Sunday Pages: "Two-Headed Calf" and "Life After Death"

Two poems by Laura Gilpin

Dear Reader,

Roland Flint, who taught my Introduction to Poetry class freshman year at Georgetown, gave us extra credit for memorizing poems. Back then, my now-beleaguered brain was still in top operating condition, and I loved poetry and admired the professor, so I took full advantage of this. Other, more pragmatic students chose the shortest poems they could find to memorize; to show off, and because it’s not un-useful to be familiar with 250-year-old rhyming-couplet pick-up lines, I went with “To His Coy Mistress.”

With his red beard and his paunch and the glimmer in his eye, Flint was a commanding presence, stocky and stout, and blessed with a booming baritone that he sometimes used to sing Bulgarian folk songs. (You can see him in action here.) To demonstrate what we’d have to do to earn points, he recited a poem that he himself knew by heart. It was called “Two-Headed Calf,” by Laura Gilpin, and it blew all of us away. I memorized it too, and when I’m in the right mood, I still recite it to myself, all four sentences of it, and marvel at its power to move me.

Polycephaly is a genetical blip that in bovines is a death sentence. Calves with two heads—or, more commonly, two faces—are usually stillborn. With extremely rare exceptions, two headed-calves that survive birth die in a matter of days, if not hours. Flint, who grew up on a farm in Nebraska, certainly knew more about this sort of thing than this child of the Jersey suburbs.

Here is Gilpin’s poem, which I have known by heart since 1991:

Two-Headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

Three decades and change later, it still kills me every time.

Why does nature fate some of us to live long, healthy lives, while others suffer in sickness and infirmity? Is there larger purpose to this design, or is it just random probabilities—simple, brutal math?

Gilpin died young. She was a poet of acclaim—she won the Walt Whitman Award in 1976 for her first poetry collection, The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe—with degrees from Sarah Lawrence and Columbia, and taught in the city for a time. Later she became a registered nurse. She worked for Planetree, and was a tireless advocate for its patient-oriented care model. In the late summer of 2006, she was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, an incurable brain cancer marked by terrible headaches, nausea, and (ironically, given that poem) double vision. She died half a year later, at age 56, right after finishing a second poetry collection, The Weight of a Soul.

After two Sundays in a row of breaking down heady novels, I intended this week to share something light, something simple and beautiful that did not require interpretation. For one thing, the news from the last seven days has been particularly bleak. For another, today is March 3—my father’s birthday. He would have been 76.

I considered writing about Roy Orbison, who my dad loved, but there was nothing I could think to say about The Big O that hadn’t already been better expressed by the likes of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Then I remembered “Two-Headed Calf.” I hadn’t shared it previously because it is relatively recent. But as both of Gilpin’s books are currently out of print, my hope is that some attention paid to her work might convince a publisher to re-issue her collections.

As I read about Gilpin last night, I came upon her obituary, which contains a quote from one of her poems, “Life After Death,” that I’d never heard before. I tracked it down and read it. This poem, too, requires no interpretation, and seems especially appropriate for my father’s birthday.

At the end of this ugly week, Dear Reader, I leave you with something beautiful:

Life After Death

These things I know:
How the living go on living
and how the dead go on living with them
so that in a forest
even a dead tree casts a shadow
and the leaves fall one by one
and the branches break in the wind
and the bark peels off slowly
and the trunk cracks
and the rain seeps in through the cracks
and the trunk falls to the ground
and the moss covers it
and in the spring the rabbits find it
and build their nest
inside the dead tree
so that nothing is wasted in nature
or in love.

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ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8—which you can subscribe to, for free, here—was Pete Strzok.

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Photo credit: Irina Iriser via Pexels.