Jarred`s Daughter Poem by Bob Dellar

Your wife wants:

this time it`s chickens.
So you winged a coop from wood and wire
for her birthday. You found a supplier
a farm near Ely, and the A10 fed you to The Fens.

Jarred`s Farm is a listing wreck

on a black claggy sea.
A faded wooden chicken leans,
propped and peeling by a front porch
that drips creeper in scarlet entrails.

The air is different here:

somehow sickly, like a mildewed echo
of marsh and stinging grey mist.
But it`s the sky`s bone-clinic whiteness
that quietly smothers you.

Jarred`s breathing is a dying accordion,

his lungs lined like a coop floor.
He guides you through a clamorous shanty
of cherished cocks and hens, their colours oozing into
the smote-filled air like a ruptured rainbow.

And then the girl appears, still wearing her summer skin,

stretching the sinews of your eyes,
eating the eyes from your head.
She curves her way through the melee
in a next to nothing floral dress,
golden-threads of straw in her midnight hair:

you reach for them.

‘Don`t touch', Jarred rasps,
his words burst you open:
you snatch your hand back
and her eyes are flecks of green ice.

You stride to the car, you flounder for the keys.
Thunderbugs float towards your sweat
in the early autumn haze,
maddening your scalp and eyebrows:

but the prickle at your neck

is Jarred`s daughter,
caressed in shadow
at an upstairs window;
her floral dress gone,

her father`s hand on her shoulder.