Look, it’s gone down to eleven,
My father’s fingers collect numbers
from the dashboard
celsius numbers
melting in his half-closed fist
and I am quiet, I feel
my silence rhymes with every sentence
in this language of observations.
That fella likes his black cows, he says,
The car funnels us past fields and walls.
We stop at the butchers
where he collects two buckets of sheep’s offal
puddled orgies of dirt pink
the close colour of mild hell
for the dogs
he keeps dogs
lurchers and terriers
there’s Samba and Orca and Coco
there are lots of dogs
they are a job of feeding.
We carry the buckets to his shed
and I help load bowls and old saucepans
with nuts and the butcher’s meat
and the leftovers of dinners
and when the job is done
I carry away with me
a nest of smells
liver and farts and fish and wet dog
and the insides of wellingtons
sweat and dark earth dirt
smells that say, here c’mere
stay in there out of that rain
it mightn’t be awful pleasant here
but the world of full of worse, far worse
and try this on you
it doesn’t look the nicest, but it’s warm
stay in, stay close
and let all the cloaking stink ward off the rest
the malice and the empty promise
and the cold grey grope of the world.
And in the car, I say nothing
while he talks about anti-cyclonic gloom
it’s a condition of the weather
I nod and remember
Oh look, he says, it’s fifteen now
It’s gone to fifteen.
It Could Be Worse © 2019 Fergus Deffely
