Red Devon (4 page)

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

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

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

about to shake hands on the deal

our fingers just microns apart when the first

                        tile

                  fell.

I saw doubt on his face, in his mind,

but too late to check the momentum of his hand

and I grabbed it and held on hard

as the crack in the barn wall yawned

and the slate rubble started to slide

and he saw in my eyes

spring grass too late for a hungry beast,

summer sheep festooned with flies,

autumn keen to surrender the year's lease

and winter's lonely expanse,

the only noise

the strangled klaxon call of the wild goose.

I shook his hand – once – and said, “Fact,

in these parts this is a contract,

big shot,”

and with the help of my Holland & Holland side-by-side

I welcomed him to my world.

After all, what's a man worth if not his word?

Viaticum

When one arrives at the pearl-grey galvanised gates

it falls to Pete to administer the last rites:

decipher the logbook, drain the tank and radiator,

disconnect the battery, the starter motor, the alternator,

take off the fuel pump, trace the registration plate

and enter it under ‘currently breaking' on the website.

Each carcass offers up its various hurts: a cracked block,

broken axle or drive shaft, a rusted-out gear box,

evidence of rollovers, jack-knifings, cab fires,

a choked slurry guzzler, a one-armed sprayer.

Diggers are propped on the knuckles of their scoops, or flat out,

their toothless buckets savouring a last mouthful of dirt.

In clean overalls, Pete checks his inventory,

lays them out and anoints each one with WD40.

Once a year Sean the Scrap swings by with his truck

to swap gossip with the blokes in the office out back

and drag out what remains after the necessary cannibalism

and take the relics to Tiverton for the final weighing in.

Cleave Farm

To go back. To climb the hill opposite the house,

that familiar wind cuffing the dry stone wall,

the grass so much come on, the dog cross-

hatching the field chasing timelines of smell,

to look down through layer upon layer of air

at the puckered slate of the stepped mounting block,

the worn lip of the trough, the scours and scars

etched by constant rain on rock,

is to feel both large and small in this panorama

unfolding around us as far as the feet know,

crop and pasture and crop stretching only so far