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.
