After the Pipe
When the man drove the lorry up,
with its grab like a Pac-Man’s jaws
spewing black lumps of fat caviar
across the pavement,
and his mate with a ring through his lip
spread it about with a spade, then
stomped his sauropod foot pump
round the cobbled square
stamping and sealing the edges
of the glossy marmite pancake,
till it blanched the way of clothes
pressed with too hot an iron,
and the centre shrank smaller,
like wheat torn by a combine,
rabbits and mice racing away
through the smoke-dust of stubble, then
I stood in the doorway, arms folded,
excited by the noise and the bulk
and the precision and the smell
and the thumping
and I wanted to share it, to be back
with a baby and a small boy
clinging to my legs, to be full of milk
and contented, hock-deep in pasture.
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