Conn - The Touch of Time: New & Selected Poems

Thundered nail turned to sacred bolt. And each night in the stable he would slaver and slave at cracked hooves, or else save bowls of porridge for just the right beast. I remember I lied to him once, about oats: then I felt the brand of his loving tongue, the belt of his own horsey breath. But he died, when the mechanised tractor came to pass. Now I think of him neighing to some saint in a simple heaven or, beyond complaint, leaning across a fence and munching grass.

Once one, badly mauled, hid behind a treacle-barrel in the shed. Throwing me back, Matthew slid the door shut. From outside the window, I watched. He stood holding an axe, with no gloves. Then it sprang; and his sleeves were drenched in blood where the teeth had sunk. I hear its high-pitched squeal, the clamp of its neat steel jaws.

And I remember how the axe flashed, severing the ferrets head, and how its body kept battering the barrels, long after it was dead.

Todd, his face ablaze, swims back in what shadow there is. Hugh and John stretch out among sheaves. Hens squabble for crusts; a dog flicks its tail at a cleg; blueflies bunch like grapes. Still the sun beats down, a hammer on tin. And high overhead vapour-trails drift seaward, out past Ailsa Craig.

Where once dense fibres oozed against gatepost and fence till staples burst, firm wheatfields sway; and where quarries reeked, intense with honeysuckle, a truck dumps load upon load of earth, of ash and slag for the raking. Spliced hawsers drag roots out and wrench the rabbit wood apart as though some cuckoo fugue had rioted. On this mossy slope that raindrops used to drill and drum through dusk, no nightjar flits nor numb hawk hangs as listening foxes lope and prowl; no lilac shadows thumb the heavy air. This holt was mine to siege and plunder, here I caged rare beasts or swayed royally on the aged backs of horses here hacked my secret sign, strode, wallowed, ferreted, rampaged. But acres crumple and the farms new image spreads over the old. As I face its change, a truck tips litter; hens assess bright tins, then peck and squawk their rage.

The truck spurts flame and I have no redress.

Wed set out across the north park, the glaur on our leggings freezing as we left the shelter of the knowes. No dogs. Even the ferrets on this day of days left squealing behind their wire. Wed fan out, taking the slope at a steady tramp. Mungo always aimed first, blasting away at nothing. Hugh cursed under his breath; the rest of us kept going.

Suddenly the hares would rise from the bracken-clumps and go looping uphill. I remember the banks alive with scuts, the dead gorse-tufts splattered with shot. One by one the haversacks filled, the blood dripping from them, staining the snow. Matthew still in front, directing the others; the sun red behind its dyke, the wind rising. And myself bringing up the rear, pretending I was lost, become the quarry. Three blasts on a whistle, the second time round.