i.m. Bill Pierce, ploughman




It was the earth what done it.
That's what she liked to think.
Not the Woodbines, the drink,
but the earth. Muck. The stuff

under his fingernails
that wouldn't scrub out.
Brought into the house
every day of her life

on the soles of his boots.
Climbing the stairs, soiling
the carpet, the sheets -
An incontinent child.

It was there from the start.
Autumn it was, the War.
Courting days. Carrying
his lunchbox out to the fields,

walking behind him, watching
the clay sucking at his heels,
wanting him back. Jealous, back
then, even before he asked;

Or laying with him, clumsy like,
between the furrows. His hands
already bark to her soft flesh.
The earth, their marriage bed.

Forty year it was. Forty years,
yoked to the thing, crawling,
he was, like his animal,
out from under a granite sky.

Turning the stubble they call it.
Giving back what you get, that's
what he said. She had to laugh.
What with the muck silting his veins,

the stone lodged in the spine,
bent so as to smell his own backside.
And now, at the last,
A gobful of earth.

And he was good with a scythe,
could have beaten Death
at his own game. But He took
him sudden like, out the back,

planting the earth again. Couldn't
keep off of it, fingers poking
the soil like a seed drill.
Lettuce for the days of her grief.

She laid him out, watching disbelief
harden on his face.
Scoured him like a doorstep,
but she couldn't get it out, not

from under his fingernails.
None of it, not even the smell.
Especially that, lingering
on his flesh like the scent

of another woman. The one he brought
to her bed every night of his life.
Jealous, even now.
She got between them in the end.


Hoxton 1987