What do I see when coming in to land?
Black rags spiraling upwards on the wind
far in the distance, past any spray arm.
Rooks winding water. Heavy rain to come.
Pietà
In Paraguay toxic pesticides on GM soy affects the health
of people living nearby. Women living within 1km of sprayed
fields are twice as likely to have a child with deformities.
There is nothing littoral
here. A green tide
covers the yard, the garden, the bosque,
washes against the casa wall,
right up to the built edge.
Open the back door and you are besieged.
Spray colonises the air.
They acted like gods, and we
beckoned them down.
Like members of the old cargo cults
cutting runways through the Chaco,
each wearing a headset
manufactured from cassava and corn,
and imitating semaphore.
We kissed the toad. Now we are
swallowing it.
Asphalt ribbons quarter the fields. What
was once patchwork is now chessboard
and on such a scale that
renders most of us speechless. In this place,
there is a kind of plenty,
in the blue of the babies,
their lust to land,
the arrangements of small limbs, the sheer
variety of arrangements,
things that go right up to
and beyond the edge, and on a scale that
renders most of us speechless.
Kissing Cousins
When your heart is broken I will give you my heart.
Got yourself a living, walking source of spare parts.
Your table bears my meat, your body my tanned hide.
My blood thickens your pudding, my lard slicks your bread.
I am friend and foe and flesh, sacred and profane,
my head on a pole, my spleen as a weather vane.
You are my maker, from conception to sticking,
crooning a lullaby or skewered on a spit,
and I’m yours, from snout to tail, from belly to loin,
yielding my brawn for your brawn, my brain for your brain.
I am suckled and relished, forbidden and cursed,
close a cousin as you like and never been kissed.
Brush-makers, saddlers, cobblers all tap-tap away
while this little piggy goes “Wee-wee-wee-wee-wee.”
Red Tide
A ‘red tide’ occurs when algae grow so fast the water appears red.
Algal blooms can result in fish kill.
Something was going on. I lay awake in bed
dreaming of biblical plagues – a river of blood
bled from efflorescences of force-fed algae –
woke fixed on the finer points of allegory
and saw, dead in the water, more than a million
blunt-lipped silverlings, a sprawled apron of chain mail.
We shoveled bucket loads, barrow loads, trawled and tipped
them, hissing, on tarps draped over a row of skips,
toenail clippings from a horde of iron giants.
When the mess was clear, we got down to the science,
wrestled with agricultural run-off and wind,
but all the white coats could make of it in the end
was a slap-up supper for five thousand seals.
One miracle gone belly up with a bad smell.
Dead Zone
Dead zones are hypoxic (low-oxygen) areas in oceans and lakes
often caused by nutrient pollution from agricultural run-off.
So we chucked a couple of pigs over the side,
cameras recording the rate at which they decayed.
On day one we got just what we were expecting.
The porkers lay on the ocean floor, unblinking.
On day two we got crabs, day three shrimp and plumed worm.
Then a dozen sea stars inched in for the long game.
Last to arrive were squat lobsters, flexing fanned tails,
claws working the pigs over like pneumatic drills.
No sharks, no orcas, just humble bottom feeders
restoring proper chaos to this strange order.
Come summer, the sea water warmed, the plankton bloomed
and even the crabs shuffled off into the gloom.
One starfish remains, dark matter in the thick brine,
too used to thin air, fondly clasping a jaw bone.
Long Pig
We eat the flesh only in wartime, when enraged,
and in a few legal instances. Theft. Treason.
Adultery. When the elders deem fit, revenge.
When a captured prisoner cannot pay ransom
in coin or woman or pig. And we find nothing
animates missionaries like being eaten.
When we introduce you to the village elders,
you men, with your degrees from Oxford and Eton,
must squat at the far end of the hut from our king
due to your woeful lack of pigs. Still, be at ease.
But when our women gather salt, and limes, and rice,
hanging coconuts like sucked skulls from the palm trees,
it might be prudent to invoke the Lord’s Prayer twice,
or whatever prayer, to whatever God you please.
Operation Blessing
In 1978 the pigs of Haiti were diagnosed with Asian Swine Flu
and were eradicated. The repopulation program had mixed results.
Good God, who has ears to hear, we are being blessed
again as for centuries we have been so blessed,
so often relieved of the burdens of freedom,
and now of our pigs, who were rude, necessary
and blessed. They were our banks, our goods, our ancestors,
with snouts like ploughs and dung rich and robust
like the coffee we grew before we became blessed.
Now we are further blessed with these useless Iowan
beasts, these princes à quatre pieds whose empty breasts
and soft stomachs shrivel in our yards, whose high heels
balk at our tough scrub, who eat only wheat-based
vitamin-supplemented better-than-we-eat food,
whose thin skin blisters and burns in the Creole sun.
Of all our blessings, good God, this has been the best.
Pig Out
March 2011: China’s largest meat processor apologises
when the illegal additive clenbuterol – used by bodybuilders
and supermodels – is found in its pork products.
It’s not like I was a gear head. Some of the swine
have pincushion glutes, lose bowel control at times.
Yeah you bet I had hypertension, the pressure
to be bigger, pinker, leaner – you get nowhere
as a natural these days and you know what they say –
the mountains are high, the emperor far away.
I was starting a cycle of clen, two weeks on,
two off, with taurine supplements and ketofen
when the order came. The driver pissed for us all.
We’re half way to Henan when the inspector calls,
sees us sweating like rapists. Runs tests. I end up
fatter than ever, metabolism scuppered,
in hock to these unpredictable fits and starts,
the lub-dub lub-pause-dub of my overblown heart.
UK 364195
Q: How do you know when a farmer has gone organic?
A: Lights on the sprayer tractor
Q: Twenty sheep in the field. One gets out. How many are left?
A: None
Bob’s Dogs
There was the one dog, neither use nor ornament.
Each morning he lurked by the tanker’s dribbling spout
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licking his chops. Spawned every cur in the district.
Bit the postman, once, and got away with it.
There was the other dog, two-bit brother to the first,
eyes like spilt milk. Danced on the slurry pit’s crust
one time too many, said Bob, and no good since.
Bit the builder’s foreman twice, and got away with it.
There was the third dog, each month went walkabout
under a chicken moon, fetching and shedding stars.
Deaf to everyone but Bob’s dad, now four years
bed-bound. What shall I say? Bit nobody, yet.
And lastly there was the bitch. Bit the child.
The four shots blew through the lanes and echoed loud
in the neighbour’s eyes. Only Bob shook my hand,
hitching his trousers up with a “Welcome, my friend.”
Stock Take
At first he can’t understand how we have another ten
cows this year when we haven’t bought any in.
Did he concentrate only in maths
and further maths
staring out of the classroom window during biology
past the perverse arithmetic of one-plus-one-makes-three,
analysing birds, auditing bees,
appraising the net asset value of flowers and grass and trees,
writing them down, writing them off?
And I feel I’m not being euphemistic enough
when I explain the absence of four or five lambs
by saying we ate them.
But when I tell him our kelpie sheepdog followed my car
half way to South Brent at thirty miles an hour
and got picked up by the dog warden in Diptford
and had to be sprung from the pound for forty quid
he insists on entering it as consultancy/legal fees.
“That dog’s too good for petty cash,” he says.
The Organic Farming Calendar
January
Iconic robin
nib deep in a fat-ball
sings a schmaltzy song.
February
Late nights in the barn
put me off my Sunday roast –
early season lamb.
March
Equinoctal sun
transubstantiates slurry –
black crust to wine gold.
April
The cruelest month.
Our neighbours’ NPK grass
is always greener.
May
A froth of blossom
on a black hedgerow.
Good things come to those who wait.
June
Pale and shivering,
ewes leave their golden fleeces
warm on the shed floor.
July
Gloucestershire Old Spots
basking in the midday sun
wallow in Piz Buin.
August
In every meadow
we make hay while the sun shines
literally speaking.
September
Harvest festival.
The altar overflows with
tinned vegetable soup.
October
Bottling cider.
Recipe for disaster:
two spoons of sugar.
November
Farmer in the wind
ploughing a lonely furrow
to Radio One.
December
Seven in a line
goose goose goose goose goose goose goose
the barn floor a quilt.
Woodcock Hay
Cuckoo oats and woodcock hay
makes a farmer run away
– old Cornish proverb
Sugars peak at midsummer then fall as the nights draw in
and for the third year in a row we’re entering August
with the hay barn empty but for some bought-in straw
and your motorbike wedged in a corner stall.
We lose patience and cut on a rumour. Rain threatens all day,
the Met Office map sprouting clouds and the odd blue drop
until out of the grey comes summer and the meadows buzz
with a mob of machines, all laying up futures in grass.
The Massey steams out of the shed like a red dragon,
the Bamford baler behind it a triumph of ’70s calibration,
part Wallace and Grommit, part Heath Robinson,
the pick up all of a pother, the chute dropping sweet oblongs
onto the stubble. This is grace consecrated in metal,
grab arms gathering, hydraulics shunting the hay
to the needles, knotters, cutters, in precise sequence,
their neat fit the only magic we know or need.
Portrait of the Artist as Venus Anadyomene
Let’s get one thing straight. I’m not nude.
I’m dressed in overalls, boots, old leather coat and
(if you’re still painting a picture of me in your mind)
drench in one hand, pitchfork in the other.
I’m looking straight at you. Less ‘come hither’ more
‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.’
I’m a modern woman. Out of respect for the genre
(and because I’m writing this stuff) I have great hair.
From Eve to Madonna, always, the main question
is what to do with my arms. Loose at my sides?
Raised up over my head to foreground my breasts
or modestly cupping my pubes? You decide. I can
do kneeling, reclining, upright at a tilt, or thigh deep
wringing bronze tresses into a painterly sea.
Between you and me, mostly I’ll take contraposto
but lose the nymphs; I’m attended by dead sheep.
Meet me half way in this small white space
and I’ll show you a good time girl, a real Goddess,
not love in the abstract, soft porn or cheap romance,
or one of your hostile fractured Cubist tarts
but a multi-dimensional farmyard demoiselle
born from this savoury agricultural soup.
I skim the soft foam perking the slurry’s crust
borne across the lagoon on a tractor-mounted dirt scoop.
Roses shower the barn roofs as I shudder to a halt.
The year-old heifers in the cubicle house shift and shit.
Maybe you find this erotic, maybe not.
I’m not what you expected? Deal with it.
*Contraposto – a pose where the weight rests on one leg, freeing the other, which is bent at the knee
Aileen
We’d never known a summer night so bright,
the moon casting a pooled spot around Aileen,
in labour proper after a day of false starts,
foursquare and straining, her breath fraught.
We knew something was wrong when the two hooves
framing the stubby snout had been poised to dive
for hours from the womb’s brutal heave upon heave
and this endless standing up and lying down.
As her fight ebbed we tied calving ropes to the hocks
and braced ourselves for the damp slab of shadow,
the lilac gums and tongue,
then the dross, the dreck,
fine veins spidering the caul, the flies a mob,
we two tramping down the hill, and a desultory cow
alone in the dark.
Red Rosette
Third at the Royal Cornwall, second at Devon County Show,
she was our first cow, and every inch the star.
She arrived to the wild applause of heavy rain,
mud sluicing the lane like a red carpet.
In the field she was best against spring grass,
showing off her coat of burnt sienna or deep rose,
her eyes saying “What goes on behind the scenes
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to create a look like this, darling, none of you know.”
She was complicated. Pregnancies came and went.
Then last year a caesar, which almost lost us the vet.
We turn it this way and that but come back to the fact
that whatever she is, Aileen isn’t a pet.
Now she sashays out of the stock box and into the race,
up through the metal gates and into the ring
where she circles, once, then looks for the brightest spot
(neck long, chest out, butt tight, stomach in).
Bidders crowd the bars like paparazzi.
Aileen swaggers and poses. What she doesn’t see
is her weight in kilos on the digital display.
As she raises her chin and pivots – one, two, three –
I know she is telling herself, “Come on girl, you got
third at the Royal Cornwall, second at Devon County Show,
surely this is a first. Now, turn with the hip, slow,
and point me towards the judge with the red rosette.”
Handshake
No wonder our sheep held still, seeing how his hands shook
as he hooked a moccasin over each foot with the one,
gripped at the greasy body of the clippers with the other.
And when he raised an arm to show he was ready for another
or reached behind him to yank on the string of the clicker
or handed me a fleece still warm from its owner
to skirt and roll and tie, and tuck into our woolsack.
After we’d helped him pack the portable rig back on the trailer,
and patched up the handful of nicks on our shorn flock
he took a mug of tea in the yard and spoke of the old times,
two-month tours shearing a hundred a day or more
eating lutefisk and dumplings in the crinkled fjords,
the dogs backing the sheep, each shed as big as a Devon field.
And evenings roistering in the bars, not to mention the maids.
How the smell of sheep dip sank deep to the bone.
Then he folded our cheque inside one corrugated palm,
and corralled my small hand in the other. None of us knew
how much of his handshake was thanks, how much tremor.
The Deal
I was ready to trade
the farm, the barns, some mediocre land,
with this moneybags London dude.
So we stood in the yard old-style
Red Devon Page 3
