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.

 


In the sawing shed

 

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.