The Clue of the Shining Farm
You go to a party and hear Ludovic’s trees
And his stream in the night like The Trout Stream.
Take inside the long pine barnboard table: new bread, roast chickens, a goose.
Just rip them apart, they’re jammed with apples and sugar-tasting brown onions. Drink Beer, drink Beamsville, his Baco Noir that tastes like jam and barnyard dirt.
Crops his neighbours dig or pick are cooked in fire or just scrubbed under the tap and laid on planks on sawhorses. New speckled eggs from cages behind the garage:
His bonfire is a hundred thousand years old.
The bonfire where older faces glow like blush and blood. The nuzzling Belgian horse, The Labrador as good as the best you ever...
Home of Ludovic the life-loving,
Whom you know to have outlived fatal humiliation and fatal defeat.
A shining friend from a brutal family,
Exciting when he has exciting plans,
Repetition, repetition, repetition, when you are not looking. Two women left him. It is a secret...
If you were there with your sweetheart she’d be pretty excited
To be with you, she’d be happy with artists and writers and poets... Ludwig: not a genius; a powerful and important almoner.
Paul Anthony Hutchinson www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com