Tractor

The tractor stands frozen - an

To think of.

All

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

In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness.

It defied flesh and won't start.

Hands are like wounds

Inside armour gloves, and feet are

As if the toe-nails were all just torn off.

I stare at it in hatred.

Beyond

The copse hisses - capitulates

In the fleeing, failing light.

Starlings,

A dirtier sleetier snow, blow smokily, unendingly,

Towards plantations Eastward.

All the time the tractor is

Through the degrees,

Into its hell of ice.

The starting

Cracks its action, like a snapping knuckle.

The battery is alive - but like a

Trying to nudge its solid-frozen mother -While the seat claims my buttock-bones,

With the space-cold of earth, which it has

In one solid lump.

I squirt commercial

Down the black throat - it just coughs.

It ridicules me - a trap of iron stupidityI've stepped into.

I drive the

As if I were hammering and

The frozen arrangement to pieces with a

And it jabbers laughing pain-crying

Into happy life.

And

Shuddering itself full of heat, seeming to enlarge

Like a demon demonstratingA more-than-usually-complete materialization -Suddenly it jerks from its

With the concrete, and lurches towards a

Bursting with superhuman well-being and

Shouting Where Where?

Worse iron is waiting.

Power-lift

Levers awake imprisoned deadweight,

Shackle-pins bedded in cast-iron cow-shit.

The blind and vibrating condemned

Of iron to the cruelty of iron,

Wheels screeched out of their night-locks -

Among the

Tonnage and burning of iron

Weeping in the wind of chloroform And the tractor, streaming with sweat,

Raging and trembling and rejoicing.