The Farmer’s Wife (part two)
The Folly
Calmacott’s Brother
The Farmer’s Wife (part two)
While I bent and cried, right hand
Rising to the hammering of my heart
Glass out of frames and littering the gravelled floor
I cared more for Arthur’s blaming me
Says the music makes me deaf
His cuttings in their boxes
His wartime gambit, making brass
Adorning cemetery plots
Still all untouched by frost, it hasn’t come
I see him smash the gramophone and then
I see myself on hands and knees, alone
Scrubbing at the doorstone
My own blood
‘Missus…pretty, them…geraniums’
I’ll not pay her any mind, I am spotting clues
Yes, my shoulders shook. I heard her laugh.
‘Missus,” again she whispered, “I have seen a man.’
A cork, a fat metal bolt, and worse
A basilisk’s egg, so I was told, white and pocked
Like coral from an ancient sea
Has this child never had a fancy?
Does she make her way in others’ rooms to find—
This, I’d dreamt must hold inside
Diamonds to deliver me, and treasured
When sentiment had lost all lustre
For that the dream was sweet
—a missile, merely, a thing at hand?
‘And I says to him…’ Bessie tells me
‘Are you hungry? Come up to the house, then.’
The Farmer’s Wife
Arthur
(2017, Stephanie Foster)