Sundress, Fortress

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CROWN LAND

Northumberland, north of lumberless land
we made the animals fight for us.
Sore warped beasts pinched off
the rag-and-bone rack, ones that bit
by barbed bit were forced to fisticuffs
in the scrub slump of hills.
With a hairline rapture these animals
came and went about our days leaving
their young to defend the palaces
they were forced from for us.
Woodcut from shadow puppets
these carousel mammals walked skewered
to the pole. With forepaws in kid gloves
they pricked ears when tindersticks lapped
our brass-green kettledrums
that laid down the distance
to their relevant demise.

After rock picking, the fields
were pocked. My uncle with a hazel switch
kicking his mule’s hide. My uncle
after twenty more one-mores, his
hat-hid forehead facing hindsight
as he ox-eyed the ten-ton dew line
that girdled the drumlins. His
cat-o’-nine-tailed spine
humped along the timber-slab paths.
His blinkered mule craning at the headlands,
eyebulbs flushing out the straight away
the only way farther and farther still
from the King’s wild company.
That mule pelt hides bone anchor points,
marrow levers, sanguine pulleys. An oilcloth
dropped on his doily-thin, God-given name.

And that’s our house, dog-eared
by a balepick hooked in the gatepost
like a tongue left on winter tin. From
a Caesarean cloudbelly, grey hounds of rain
tear messenger pigeons down to the charred till
of this furrowed land. At the crown of the fox tower
I pull my scope from its rat hide case, come in close
on Uncle with that mule under his loins
scraping home in ankle drags. The gully
was as far as I got by eye. The rest I only
heard. Shotglass-wide was the rain
that night. And then the noise
I’m writing to forget
as the barren hounds
caught onto him.

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