Building
Soon they'll take the
scaffolding down from
the house they've been building
since April
next door but one to us
(looking west).
We come and go and avoid
looking up -
we'd rather the builders didn't
mention
neighbours slant-eying into the
bedrooms
before there were windows to
slant-eye through.
The idea's practically realised
in
this subdivided block and brick
box
with lintelled gaps, cavities
spilling yellow filling
and a skeleton Toblerone bar
above
that timber-frames polygons of
sky.
When the builders pack their
pickup and leave,
we see through the glassless
windows
where, under an insulated loft,
people will fluster in towels
on the landing,
question a mirror, question its
answer,
learn and forget about each
other
and put on brave faces to face
their days.
The builders are tock-ticking
trowels
they could ice a wedding cake
with
and riffling wafery stacks of
tiles.
Their conversation rises and
falls behind
Something FM at moderate volume
or sounds of three trowels
cementing at once,
but snatches ("yeah, maybe", "she
said so")
and laughing hang in the
fly-speckled afternoon
in the space they're shaping
into a house.
Raymond's splay-legged on a
purple cushion
on boards screwed to struts of
his circular saw.
His tractor's in the shadows
with brown sacks
across its bonnet and the reek
of it's
as strong down there as wood
and dust are here.
He's leaning forward, feeding
in oak gateposts
so the teeth rip through them
and stove door-sized chunks
drop to the sawdusty floor on
top of
each other with hefty knocks. Behind
him
low sunshine streams in at the
door and the hole
rats have gnawed where black
sleepers are propped.
The machine grumbles rattlingly
as it idles
and raises its pitch to a
screech when
he pushes the shortening post
to the blade.
Anyone walking past might
wonder
if bone being sawn would sound
like that.
The Winter Feed
See what I did? Raymond's
father asked him
as they drank tea and a wind
swished round the yard.
I stuck. Like shit to a blanket, I stuck here.
When people used to tell me,
You can leave,
you're not tied here because
your father was,
I said, Do you think that's
news to me?
That I think there's a law that
says stay here
when I've a van topped up with
juice outside?
It seems a simple choice for a
man to make:
he's humping weight as though
there's clay clagged
round his boots that slows him
down and holds him -
so he swings his legs and kicks
it off
and soars up with the crows.
But I knew that I couldn't cut
off clean:
I knew I'd only be me somewhere
else
and harvest's no more harvest
there than here.
He turned the cold tap on. They swilled their cups
and took their jackets off the
hooks.
The winter feed wouldn't stack up by itself.