Giles Goodland
The Fly Tip
Between our house and the road,
a forbidden zone. We crawled through
the hedge into a mulch of plasterboard
and leaves, tyres and wild garlic tubers,
old twin tubs and kelvinators
opening like museum cabinets,
contents strewn between oak columns.
We were hoping to read the message
in the loops of bailer-twine marking
certain trees, or in the bines of ivy
which pointed from the doors
of enamelled gas-ovens. We schemed out
maps that might decode
these dispositions, tell us where to dig.
And what did we ever find? No more
than was credible. Bottomless saucepans,
kilner jars with the rubber rotted
to a pink ring of skin, willowpattern
and earthenware shards, crumpled
pewter traced over with a tree-like
verdigris, glass valves that would still
explode with a puff of inert gas,
and beside a dead campfire, a tramp’s
old shoes, quite fresh, which we took away,
black soles lolling from the welts, calkins
snapping a fishtooth snarl. These,
we concluded, were the shoes of
a murdered man, and proceeded
to search for the corpse, combing
for other leads: some cloth snagged on a wire,
a few grease-black Victorian ha’pennies
and the keel of an old plough
unearthed in a newly turned field.
The real body is undisturbed
in a clearing, a county or parish away.
A loose blanket of soil, torn tarpaulin
and leaves give roothold for sorrel
or dead-nettle to overgrow the hairline
between that which stays firm,
and that which turns over to soil.
Page(s) 104
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