When I dream I swim in blood.  I drink it.  Black and thick it slides down my throat in a swirl.  I rinse my teeth with it like Scope and smile at you before I choke, before it floods over me and sucks me down.  Usually you can’t find this much blood.  There aren’t just pools of it lying around.  You can’t stumble into a pool of blood and drink it.  There are lists for blood, it is fought for, shed and conquered.  You don’t ask for blood.  It is bestowed.

He said, “I don’t think we’ve ever been to the mountains.”

We’ve seen the forests and lakes and rivers, muddy sloughs rampant with muskrats.

“You and me, we’ve never been to the mountains.”  He said this nodding, assured he was right.  His wide face was smooth and unlined – his eyes were slightly crossed as he looked down at his cigarette.

Blood is on a circuit, body electricity. Layers of circuits circulating each other.  Blood is so necessary that we should have outlets; a place we can flow into each other. 

Blood is no stranger to DeMuth or me.  We worked together, spilling blood from animals.  You can always find a meatpacking plant in dirty cities.  You can smell them, the mixture of hunger and disgust.  We packaged blood, stringy and pure and hopeless.  I could imagine it bottled and labeled.  DeMuth lost a finger in Sioux City; racing to the hospital I could see the neon blue bridge lights like the veins in his hand.  They just hovered over the plant.  The river below made me believe my blood was rushing out of his index finger.  I first believed all blood is on a cosmic balance.  Our car, the river, pushing the scales in someone else’s favor.

We moved more toward the production of blood instead of packaging.  More variety, less risk.  Alone in a twelve-hour shift with only one album to listen to I could birth between fifteen and twenty calves.  Or lambs, I never tried anything else. 

Bovine blood is particularly slippery.  Our boss told us it is because of the high levels of glycerol in the blood.  When the cows are fed too much protein, it turns to glycerin, which bound to the nitrogen in the blood.  Cows here were explosive.  We both quit smoking around the cows. 

DeMuth would sometimes take a lighter and a medicine vial and slowly craft a pipe.  He wouldn’t hesitate to smoke his pipe, except around the cows.  He climbed into the rafters above the birthing pens and smoked.  I’d throw syringes at him try to make him fall.  We used calcium oxide to keep our area free from flies.  Put a pinch in his pipe, his face tinged blue.  Asphyxiation is bloodless.  I knew he wouldn’t die.  He was the kind of person who wasn’t afraid to test his limits with me.   

With each birth blood would pool on the floors.  October in Missouri it rained for a month and every cement alley filled with rust – colored water.  Its own cycle of blood – from birth to alley back to cow.  I could only think of the water cycle from third grade and wondered why I hadn’t been shown this vastly more interesting cycle. 

My hands were always covered in blood; at midnight we’d eat cheap sandwiches with dirty hands, red fingerprints remaining on the bread balled inside our stomachs.  During lunch DeMuth found a frog and dipped its hind legs in some blood.  That frog couldn’t jump for a couple hours until the glycerin-filled blood dried.  Neither of us could laugh -- we watched that frog.  It just sat there, like a Missouri deer caught in the open flood plain.

Human blood looks like cherry éclairs, rich and inviting, swirling and sweet.  It can turn dark like a storm after a few hours.  I can imagine the quick burst of flavor.

On our day off we climbed over fallen concrete bridge supports, like climbing a smooth mountain.  At one time a bridge was going to be built here over this stream that feeds the Mississippi.  The project had long-since been abandoned.  I followed DeMuth and tried to think of a way to view my own blood inside me.  Like a wave it pulsates to the very edge of my skin, nearly bursting through until it recedes.  Another pulse follows, each vampiric cell screaming for more, keep up heart, keep up we’re thirsty. 

The last support was at a steep angle.  I picture violence creating and destroying these pillars.  Massive weight, bloodless stems.  DeMuth and I crawled up that last one without ropes.  It hung out over the water of the shallow stream, still anchored thirty feet in the bank.  We slowly walked over water.  DeMuth just hovered on the edge.  He only looked at me once before he jumped.  It must have been thirty feet and he plunged into the creek. 

The top of his head barely broke the surface.  He struggled across the current and made it back to the bank.  A branch had come under him and he broke through it.  His pants were torn, blood leaked through.  It ate a line in the denim as we started walking back.  I wanted it to be funny – his feet snapping that branch, his face snapping into the water.  DeMuth only limped a little at first, so I kept my distance.  I limped with him and it wasn’t long before I had my shoulder under his arm.  We clung together, I could feel his pulse under his arm; I could see it in his neck keeping time with our staggered progress.  It felt good to help him.  He could feel my blood racing to every part of me while his leaked out. 

No bones were broken, only skin.  I can imagine the branch ripping through each cell, exploding the mitochondria everywhere, blood rushing to fill the void, pouring out, like sap.  Blood dripped – it bonded with the skin to form a scab – a liquid blockade for liquid.  When we got back home I washed the crust away to expose the new red rush.  Ice staunched the outpouring and we sat together silent until it was time for work. 

I let DeMuth work slow, taking time to adjust to his injury.  His face reflected the glow from the lights, only interrupted by his eyes.  Lunch was more bread, knotting my stomach; we ate silently and nodded as we chewed.  Work was easy movement; there is fluidity to birth and I could pull a baby animal from the uterus and let it lie there and struggle to breath.  I knelt and wiped the nostrils clean, using a piece of grass to tickle the nose of the calf.  It sneezed and sucked in breaths, glared at me, heaving.

We returned to the bridge a couple weeks later when DeMuth was feeling better.  His shirts were all stained with blood, his wound bursting open during the night, during exertion.  He didn’t want to jump again, the river was higher, and the rain kept coming.  Concrete was chipped and pocked.  We slid back down.  DeMuth was right beside me when we reached the ground.  I wasn’t sure if I should have jumped into the river instead, to reassure him.  A slap on the back a couple of times I’m sure helped.  He wasn’t limping any longer but the blood must have made him anxious.

The sky was wet and we had our coats on.  We strolled together through each group of sleeping cows, looking for any that were straining in a prelude to birth.  Breathing the fumes the cows emitted, we stepped carefully, meticulously through pen after pen.  We filled syringes with vitamins and put them in the cooler so we could be prepared.  DeMuth heated colostrum for the newest calves and we knelt to feed them. 

I like to think that blood is given in unlimited amounts, a renewable resource that will never run dry.  DeMuth nods at me as he swirls the milk in the pail -- hot and steaming -- I can smell it all around me. 

Late that day, clutching his arm I climb the support.  We try running to the top, but the angle is too intense.  Without waiting for comment I leap away from safety, plummeting with my arms hanging loose.  I am engulfed.  Under the water DeMuth is with me.  We are pushed and pulled by the current.  We are spun against and away from each other.  Blood pounds through our limbs, swelling our hands and feet.  We flail together.

There are mountains waiting for us.  Together we lay heaving like calves.  I can feel my blood reaching for the ground.  DeMuth tries to laugh.  He helps me to my feet. 

“Don’t you think we should try the mountains for a while?”

“I don’t know.”

There are dull spots of blood on my shoes that will remain there.  DeMuth climbs on the rafters and smokes.  Sometimes I climb up there with him and we’ll lean against each other.  Scars from the river rocks are still red but not bloody.  I want to hug him and tell him my theories on blood. 

Months of bread and the smell of birth.  DeMuth doesn’t say much; he won’t go to the river without me.  I tingle when I think I might die.  Red hands clasping red hands.  We each grab a leg and strain to free the head from the birth canal.  DeMuth nods at how good we are.  No calves bleed, no calves die when we are here.

“I want to quit this job.”  I’m surprised that I tell him while we eat our sandwiches.  Our hands will never be clean.  I think DeMuth will tell me that he’ll stay.  I think I’ll tell him I don’t have the stomach for this bloody work.  He puts his hand on my shoulder and leaves bright streaks.  We nod together and finish eating.  This is the complication.