Cows In Art Class - Analysis

From good weather to the bar’s bad climate

The poem’s central claim is ugly and revealing: the speaker uses a crude theory about women and stability to explain his own emotional weather, but that explanation collapses into a more frightening truth—his real struggle is not with women at all, but with how to live with himself. The opening comparison (Good weather is like good women) sets a tone of casual dismissal, as if intimacy were just another unreliable forecast. Yet the poem keeps returning to weather as a moral atmosphere, and by the end the weather is explicitly bad for cows—bad, that is, for innocence, steadiness, and the simple life he briefly remembers being able to paint.

The speaker’s shaky “science” of women (and why he needs it)

His claims about men and women are blunt enough to sound like bar talk dressed up as certainty: Man is more stable; a woman is changed by children, / age, / diet, even the moon. The list is both accusatory and anxious. It’s as if anything that might alter a person becomes proof that women can’t be trusted to remain lovable, while men get the comfort of a fixed identity—bad men stay bad, good men might hang on. The contradiction is that the speaker is not stable at all. He insists men can become stronger by being hated, but he is clearly not being strengthened; he is being hollowed out.

Spangler’s Bar and the lost cows

When he says, I am drinking tonight in Spangler’s Bar, the poem lands in a specific room, and the memory of art class arrives like an unwanted tenderness: the cows he painted looked good, even better than anything / in here. That contrast matters. The cows are not glamorous; they’re ordinary, slow, and domestic. Remembering them is a brief return to a self who could look steadily at something and make it coherent. The bar, by contrast, is full of people who seem knowing—a fake wisdom that grows as it’s getting darker. The cows become a measure for what the speaker has lost: uncomplicated attention.

The poem’s turn: love and hate detach from their objects

The hinge comes when he admits the old rules for directing feeling outward have failed: wondering which to love, but the rules are gone. He doesn’t resolve the question by choosing a woman or an enemy; instead, love and hate recoil inward: I love and hate only myself. The image that follows—feelings standing outside him like an orange rolling away—shows disconnection rather than catharsis. Even his emotions have become objects he can’t quite reach. This is the poem’s starkest tension: he speaks as if he’s judging women for changeability, but his own inner life is sliding away from him, uncontrolled.

Kill myself or / love myself?—and the failure of information

His question is not rhetorical; it’s procedural, as if he needs instructions: Which is the treason? and Where’s the information / coming from? Books, he decides, are like broken glass—dangerous, useless, not even fit for the crudest purpose. That rejection of books isn’t just anti-intellectual swagger; it’s despair at not finding a livable story. In the same breath, the bar offers its own “wisdom,” reduced to livestock-shopping vulgarity: Buy the cow with the biggest body parts. The line is funny and grim: it turns the earlier “weather/women” analogy into a full marketplace logic, where desire is supposed to be measurable, and therefore safe. But safety is exactly what he can’t manufacture.

The body as tool: pliers-hand, sprinter-beer, brush-ready

The closing scene turns intensely physical. The bartender slides a beer like an Olympic sprinter, and the speaker’s hand becomes a pair of pliers—a tool, not a human limb. Alcohol is named with contempt (golden piss) yet taken as medicine. Then, unexpectedly, the language of painting returns: my brush is ready to raise green grass, as if the cows and their pasture are still possible somewhere in him. The final admission—sadness takes me all over—doesn’t resolve into enlightenment; it resolves into a decision to keep going by force: a shot to give me the guts / and the love to go on. The poem ends with love not as romance, not as a theory about women, but as a raw substance he must swallow to survive.

A sharper way to read the cruelty

What if the poem’s misogyny is not only prejudice but also a kind of self-protection—an attempt to keep the real verdict from landing where it belongs? When he reduces women to diet and moon, and then reduces desire to biggest tits, he’s trying to make affection mechanical. But the moment he asks kill myself or / love myself?, the machinery breaks, and the poem admits the one instability he can’t blame on anyone else.