Poem 459

The Crewe murders and the particular strain of claustrophobic rural madness which that embodied and revealed, endemic to our farming nation … flip side of Country Calendar … I like the way bucolic suggests colic … this does owe something to quardle oodle ardle – and a little bit of Polanski’s Repulsion …

( I like the image of wind blown flax flickering like flames, the bugs and the lilies as threatening delusions, the word play of dogs worrying sleep (not sheep), and the grim double meaning of the last image … I knew a farm boy living in town who nevertheless kept a loaded .22 in his wardrobe to shoot out his window at birds … )

Bucolic

A shot through the open louvres
rattles the teapot
                                   blue flax flickers
      wind-driven flames at the windows
      I would like to think the house is burning down
but it's only
those of us in it
purple monstrous bugs are behind the wallpaper
lilies speak in tongues waxed
and poisonous
                                tractors surround us
          dogs in their draughty houses
          worry sleep
the magpie rises to the top of a pine something
hanging in his yellow beak

I shot at him from the bedroom window
         my wife was having a period
         out of her head