Rebecca Foust

EMPATHY*

for Dr. Temple Grandin, autistic veterinarian

When she was little, visiting her
uncle and aunt's ranch, she liked
to get into the cattle press, flick
the lever to squeeze its sides in,

then she began to believe
she had a body, not just
a collection of electrons
repelling each other in space.

She was thought to lack empathy
for sad events, her classmates' tears,
but she noticed the other things
—rocks getting crushed, stars

that were dying. She hated
how cattle herded for slaughter would mill
about moaning, stamping their hooves,
would sometimes stampede

in eyerolling panic; she noticed
how they moved in the stockyards
to soothe themselves—in circles,
like water. She pondered her need

for pattern and order, how swinging
or rocking could calm her, and she
thought of a way to ease that ascension
to abattoir hell. She thought

of a ramp rising in widening circles,
like water. The feedlot execs could see
a PR trend, so they put the ramps in.
But they didn't see much more than

customers feeling sorry for cows; not
what Aquinas saw, that cruelty
to animals diminishes the human.
They did not, like Temple, wear

bovine skin, snort blood and fear, flick
flies with her tail, speak
with her doomed brethren
in Angus and Brahmin.

*Previously published in Clackamas Literary Review.

Rebecca Foust's book Dark Card, from which the above poem was taken, won the 2007 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Award and her full length collection was a finalist for Poetry's 2007 Emily Dickinson First Book Award. A second chapbook, Mom's Canoe won the 2008 Phillips Prize and will be released in 2009. Foust's poetry has won several distinctions and appears in Atlanta Review, JAMA, Margie, North American Review, Nimrod and others.