The tractor stands frozen - an agony
To think of. All night
Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale,
A spill of molten ice, smoking snow,
Pours into its steel.
At white heat of numbness it stands
In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness.

It defied flesh and won't start.
Hands are like wounds already
Inside armour gloves, and feet are unbelievable
As if the toe-nails were all just torn off.
I stare at it in hatred. Beyond it
The copse hisses - capitulates miserably
In the fleeing, failing light. Starlings,
A dirtier sleetier snow, blow smokily, unendingly, over
Towards plantations Eastward.
All the time the tractor is sinking
Through the degrees, deepening
Into its hell of ice.

The starting lever
Cracks its action, like a snapping knuckle.
The battery is alive - but like a lamb
Trying to nudge its solid-frozen mother -
While the seat claims my buttock-bones, bites
With the space-cold of earth, which it has joined
In one solid lump.

I squirt commercial sure-fire
Down the black throat - it just coughs.
It ridicules me - a trap of iron stupidity
I've stepped into. I drive the battery
As if I were hammering and hammering
The frozen arrangement to pieces with a hammer
And it jabbers laughing pain-crying mockingly
Into happy life.

And stands
Shuddering itself full of heat, seeming to enlarge slowly
Like a demon demonstrating
A more-than-usually-complete materialization -
Suddenly it jerks from its solidarity
With the concrete, and lurches towards a stanchion
Bursting with superhuman well-being and abandon
Shouting Where Where?

Worse iron is waiting. Power-lift kneels
Levers awake imprisoned deadweight,
Shackle-pins bedded in cast-iron cow-****.
The blind and vibrating condemned obedience
Of iron to the cruelty of iron,
Wheels screeched out of their night-locks -

Fingers
Among the tormented
Tonnage and burning of iron

Eyes
Weeping in the wind of chloroform

And the tractor, streaming with sweat,
Raging and trembling and rejoicing.

“You can turn away”, he says
as he sets the bowl and scalpel
on the tray next to my bed.
I wince, obligingly
lower my head,
but as the blade digs in
I watch him work,
painstaking.
Extracting one shard
at a time from my arm:
pincering it out, spluttered with blood
catching a glimpse of the glint, like a flash,
before glass hits tin.

No tears then, only after,
when he stares and says:
“You won't do that in a hurry again.”

The scent of wild garlic plumps the air
in the narrow, deep valley of the brook.
The oak trees either side
reach across, clasping hands,
trapping the heat and the smell.

A trout ***** up stream,
jumping the shallow current.
Crouching on the pebble beach,
two children watch it land,
plunk,
in the depths further up.

'Fish! That's what we need, fish!'
He blunders up the river,
hands outstretched,
as though to catch the trout in his palms.

Deepening the rock pool,
scuds scurrying out of sight,
the girl notices the thin, black water slug
stretched out on her chalky forearm.

Pincering it off with her fingers,
she doesn't scream until
spotting the ****** mark,
as the leech reaches up
to wrap itself round her finger.

With a flick of her wrist,
it splacks onto a dry, flat rock.
She crushes its body with a pebble,
and the smell of iron mingles with the garlic.