Paddock Calls

Slow deletion here. The local Trust —
finishing-school for county brides,
horse-lovers, bandy-legged roarers —
has taken back the paddock beyond the willow:

its hulk of shed a rusty lummock
in a pale pond of grass — And bees,
wasps and slow-circuiting fruit-flies
are stipple on the stipple of far hawthorn,

pheasants crick and strut
their old-tin feathers, grass shivers with mice
and cousins of mice. Folding down,
all of it:

folding and sinking out of pasturage
into the half-life of scrub; set-aside.
That cultivation history: bones
of the old ways, old disciplines,

lying like the fox-bones under hedge
or grass.  Where change seems impossible
to townie pastoralists — change happens;
tightens the land’s skin. Encroachments happen,

shrinkage. The rural display,
temporal as seasons in this arable,
is a waxing wane.  Its mooney green
slowly deletes shed, hedge, wire: the neighbour

who worked this paddock till six years ago.
He stares into it, over my shoulder.