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Today is Black Cow Float Day.
Legend has it that a Black Cow Float was originally called a “Black Cow Mountain” because Frank Wisner, owner of a soda fountain in Cripple Creek, Colorado in the 1890s, was inspired by the snow on the peak of Black Cow Mountain to add a scoop of vanilla ice cream to root beer or cola. A spritz of chocolate syrup is optional.
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A Cow Kind of World
.
by Marilyn Lott
.
You know, I wouldn't mind if I
Were living in a cow kind of world
Green grass and red dirt roads
A sky overhead with cloudy swirls
.
Just eating and having little chats
You don't have a single care
Life is gentle and relaxing
At least no problems you're aware
.
Following one another sometimes
Like to the shade or out of the rain
Or to the grain trough or pile of hay
They always want the very same
.
Moms and aunts share in calf-sittin'
While the babies take a little snooze
Everyone getting along it seems
Don't feel they have a thing to lose
.
Yes, I think it would be a good life
If in my next time around I was hurled
Into the life that seems quite satisfying
In a comforting cow kind of world!
.
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The Cow in Apple-Time
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by Robert Frost
.
Something inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wall-builders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,
She scorns a pasture withering to the root.
She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten.
The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.
She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.
She bellows on a knoll against the sky.
Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.
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“The Cow in Apple-Time” from Complete Poems of Robert Frost,© 1964 by Lesley Frost Ballantine – Holt, Rinehart and Winston
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Hey, diddle, diddle
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– from Mother Goose
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Hey, diddle, diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
.
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The Cows at Night
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by Hayden Carruth
.
The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light
.
faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.
.
Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist
.
of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw
.
the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.
.
I stopped, and took my flashlight
to the pasture fence. They turned
to me where they lay, sad
.
and beautiful faces in the dark,
and I counted them–forty
near and far in the pasture,
.
turning to me, sad and beautiful
like girls very long ago
who were innocent, and sad
.
because they were innocent,
and beautiful because they were
sad. I switched off my light.
.
But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how
.
in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all.
I stood by the fence. And then
.
very gently it began to rain.
.
"The Cows at Night," from Toward the Distant Islands: New & Selected Poems, © 2006 by Hayden Carruth – Copper Canyon Press
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