Where’s they going grampy?
Fondling the tin marker in the calf’s ear
I felt its coat of dried mud shudder
as his hand came down once more.
The thwack sent it skidding up the planks
like a potted billiard ball.
Twenty years later
I can’t grasp that tongue.
Can’t get a hold of the skull
between two firm hands and prise it open.
My accent was drained out of me.
A slit bullock over a drain
taught to sound better
my nose forced down in a trough of grammar.
Those words that dripped off his tongue.
The lolling, spittly threads
of long Berkshire a’s and r’s
were sluiced clean away.
Now I stand at a window
in Oxford’s covered market
looking down through my reflection
at a tray of severed tongues.
Trying to find a bucket for his vowels.
I lean over and point my father’s gaze
at the photo of Bud Finch
at the wheel of his ‘Minneapolis Moline’ tractor
which, though sunk during the war,
had been salvaged.
Later, as a storm battered
the tin roof of our garage
and flakes of broken fence spread across our lawn,
I returned to Bud’s memoirs.
One winter the Thames here froze over
and horses walked out across the river
to graze upon the reeds.
One fell through
and men from Bud’s village pulled it out,
laid it on a gate, carried it back to the village.
This flashes through my mind as I cross
the same water in the passenger seat of my dad’s truck.
We are working at a mental institution,
(once a military hospital)
slipping under the wooden floorboards of wards
to fireproof heating ducts with glass fibre.
We hear heavy horses above, wandering.
Later still I discover that my maternal grandfather
lay in that hospital as I was born in the winter of ’59.
My mother tells me I was taken in and shown to him
like a new tractor brought onto his farm.
Did his eyes see swaddling bands, metal bed, window bars
and bare floorboards glazed with water
or did they see barn, field, horses,
folding under snow,
ships sinking in a blizzard.
