This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You
Page 36
a smell like apple bruises and horse chestnut shells.
A smell of pure energy.
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Your father claimed this ground
would grow five-pound notes
if you planted a shilling.
That I would like to see.
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Flatness | straight lines | a manmade geometry.
The sound of metal on soil // the sky above
This is the landscape you I we grew up in.
This is the landscape which grew us which made us.
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The sea wants to be here. we shouldn’t be surprised when
will give to that
Our engineering gives way before the sea’s desire.
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You didn’t say that. That’s not what you said
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to name these places
The words we’ve been given by our ancestors have no poetry.
Our waterways are called drains,
not rivers or streams or brooks or burns:
Thirty Foot Drain
Sixteen Foot Drain
(and the closest to grandeur, this) Hundred Foot Drain
our farms named for anonymity: Lower Field Farm
Middle Field Farm
Sixteen Foot Farm
People don’t come here because they’ve been