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Hanging was really his second string, after the cobbling his father taught him. All through his soling and heeling years, execution played on his mind and he dreamt up the dislocation system that spared a man minutes of dangling, choking. He and his body weight/length of drop method travelled from Lincoln to London and Dublin. He charged people sixpence to handle his nooses and sold them black bootlaces as souvenirs. His own end began with a voyage to Ireland disguised as a priest to see off the three Phoenix Park murderers. Threatening letters cost him his sleep and a chill that he picked up at dawn on the gallows fatally inflamed his lungs. Memento hunters chipped chunks off his gravestone and Mr West of the Portland Arms kept his ropes on the curtain pole, hanging there.
in collection Half a Field's Distance: New and Selected Poems, 2006, Shoestring Press, ISBN 978 1 904886 39 6 previously published in Critical Survey
He takes time on. It comes to terms with him. He knows it better than he used to, how it tells through clocks its monotone untruths about when everything begins and ends. The inlaid clock his mother left not ticking on its clock-shaped shadow on her parlour wall chimes down his hollow hallway any hour except the right one. Certain cars, his postman, waving people strolling past with dogs can plot a day, so that his brisket’s in, he’s pegged out shirts and gone to the bank or to sleep in his chair not early, but not too late. In the order of things, things lose their order while clocks watch Raymond, in his own good time.
in collection Half a Field's Distance: New and Selected Poems, 2006, Shoestring Press, ISBN 978 1 904886 39 6 previously published in Anon
Lord Waithe told Raymond he could stay on at the old Estate house Joe and Cissie brought him up in, with two brothers and three sisters who went seeking love and money.
But, being just the quid-an-hour man who hoed gravel for the families in new houses on Ted Sant’s field (near the dip that flooded), Raymond let paint flake and gutters fall.
He baked pies in his mother’s tins and sliced them with her wedding knife, brewed thin tea in the crusted pot and ate redcurrants raw. At night he gazed across the purple slopes
he’d searched for curlews’ eggs those afternoons he skipped arithmetic, then squeaked the unlit stairs to bed and lay forgetting till slow dawns he sometimes did not notice broke.
What was it made him leave his home and walk before the sun was fully up to fall amongst the pine cones where the gamekeeper would find him when he walked that way at nine?
Some said the instinct of a countryman who knows these things as dogs do. Others thought it might have been the mantel clock, its tick and chime, the weight in his hand of the key.
in collections: Half a Field's Distance: New and Selected Poems, 2006, Shoestring Press, ISBN 978 1 904886 39 6 and Small Affairs on the Estate, 1992, ISBN 1 900974 12 6, Pikestaff Press previously published in Smiths Knoll
Sheep mark the distances down to the sea, graze, outlineless, against the silver band that glints below the washed, grey-blue marquee of Channel sky we’re under, in a land of flooded pastures, trees blown crooked by harsh winds (less harsh, for once, today), gorse not quite yellowing yet and, out there where the eye can’t pick out starts and ends of things, or what a shape or colour’s signifying, slopes that rise to level as the Downs, with ways across them you included in your hopes and schemes to walk with me, you said, in days when you rode with us here in our first car, and where, by now, there’s just a chance you are.
in collection Half a Field's Distance: New and Selected Poems, 2006, Shoestring Press, ISBN 978 1 904886 39 6 previously published in Other Poetry |
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