Being Grunt Garvey


    Winsome is sixteen today. She sprawls
    like a crumpled ballerina straddling the drainage gully
    while her sisters mill around and munch hay.

    Grunt brooms slurry off the concrete floor.
    There's more than one way to skin a cow
    but, this being Grunt Garvey, he will do it the one way

    and sling her from the spike with webbing strops
    like the special delivery under a stork's beak
    or Darcey Bussell performing a grand jeté.

    It could all go wrong. I see her paddling the air,
    the noose – which it is – too high, too low, or both
    and, this being Grunt Garvey, things don't go to plan–

    she proves to be quite the Houdini, although
    it's rather more than two minutes thirty-six seconds
    before she hits the straw with a wet thud.

    Grunt goes for the JCB with the gap-toothed scoop
    to shovel her up like chippings, or so much grain.
    Of course it can't go wrong, but this being, etc.

    she rolls in like a set of bagpipes with a low moan,
    steam from her paunch soft-focussing her face
    and more than a little damage to her tail bone.

    Midday tomorrow, if she's not on her feet
    (on pointes if you're chasing the extended metaphor)
    the local knackerman will bring his gun

    and attempt a short duet
    before Winsome struts her stuff for the last time
    along the tightrope of his winch and chain

    into his tatty van. For those familiar with the charm
    of a cow's final fouetté,
    this is a good time to look away.


    Knackerman


    Rattling down the lane comes John Teague,
    eager to please, eager to do his job,
    partly because he is four days late
    and the ewe dumped by the shed is on the turn.

    Don't ask him what he knows,
    John Teague, with his aura of flies,
    one eye up the chimney, one eye down the pot,
    leaving nothing but a damp stain on the road.

    He knows the inside of a pig's mind.
    To put his gun to the back of a ram's head.
    How a cow falls to her knees as if in prayer
    in this reverse nativity in a half-dark byre.


    Burgoo


    "You got livestock, you got dead stock," hollers Grunt.
    He slams the tailgate, waves Teague off the farm.
    Stan from Stags has come to talk about forms
    and how everyone's going to die of BSE.

    In the kitchen Stan's telling Dad about New Variant CJD.
    Grunt makes mugs of instant on the Rayburn.
    Mum says she knows a man with a sponge for a brain.
    Dad says he knows a mad cow

    but they must be proper mental in Kentucky,
    eating road-kill varmints in a stew.
    "A few ears short of a bushel," says Stan,
    "and five of them dead too."

    What sort of varmints, Grunt wants to know.
    "Used to be squirrel or possum," says Stan,
    "but these days it's beef or lamb."
    New Variant burgoo.

    "Eggs and brains," says Mum, "the butcher's treat,
    we had that every week when we were young."
    "No wonder your brains are scrambled," says Grunt,
    and throws his slops down the sink.

    That night they sit out, skimming stones on the slurry.
    Teague says, "Remember the road-kill kid,
    spit-roast rats, hedgehogs wrapped in mud,
    what happened to him?"

    "We had a fight in woodwork once," says Grunt,
    "he tried to cut off my head with a junior hacksaw.
    But he got diabetes and moved to Ugborough.
    What goes around comes around."

    "After all that squirrel stew," says Teague,
    "reckon he's not coming round no more."


    Grunt's Bane


    One foot in the furrow, one on the grassed ridge,
    he strolls lopsided, sniffs at pineapple mayweed,
    listens as stonechats crack pebbles in the hedge,
    counts on his fingers how thistles annex his land.

    Spear thistles rattle their sabres in open scrub.
    Dwarf thistles lurk in the couch, planning a raid.
    Spotted thistles infest his set aside, their sly lobes
    and pale flowers colonising his waysides.

    Tall bull thistle, creeping thistle, tuberous and woolly,
    nodding in the pastures, inching across his red loam,
    crowding the shaled edge of the old quarry,
    sharper than hoof picks, tougher than baler twine.

    Blessed and bitter,...