Alchemisland

When in Siamese proximity residing, much by necessity is implied

And all requires prior design. At wan light time, whitewashed, swannish

With haughty day’s honest fire quashed

The first Boche-shell burst of uncurtained eternity; far Mars a fox hanged.

Labourers dusty return hungry from thankless days parading oxgangs

Maintaining mortarless gates, sustaining estate selvedges

Surveying with envious gaze the reckoned-superior grazing spans

Sere-seeming their own oft-teeming lands. Wise adage

That greener all grass stands from the farseer’s vantage.

That or this glistening clime surpassing far a neighbour’s pasture.

The absentest farmer, the blow-in, who despite disaster, lapsing corn

And wilting flax jilted misery, jape delivering whilst he laughed.

The requisite mask allowed lapse

Proudness found unflattering, unallowable, where they plough and thatch.

Gordon accordingly called Imogen cow

Slattern who could not tend a house, anything to provoke a row

From the mouse, but he was a sly fox, who never let anything out.

That o’er-happy husbandman cautioned, quietly and off to one side

Loud as thought to thinker the bloodrush of a fingered guilty. Veins tauten.

‘Twixt cordon and rust-gingered byre oft-sidled by

The pride-prickling matter of Gordon’s prick-pickling wife.

The accuser’s unlively lips jutted out to meet the bounder.

The listener’s nose ripe breath battered; stink of whiskey;

To hold or even wrinkle one’s nose tantamount to flinching.

Tomlongwhiskered was Gordon Fynes, moustaches one minded could plait

Gordon spat near Sam’s spats then laughed, smug as

Come now the hour of his brashness!

One sanctioned action in a life of wild rashness. The hourglass flashed.

Gordon’s finger brandished damagingly, near the ravisher’s eye

Would pry out purloined images of his uninnocent wife Imogen Fynes

Ní Lyons.

Their alliances were conducted in mucky barns, in monklike silence

Two straw calumnies courting bunnylike upon a binding-cooking pyre.

A pilum violently spiking a lion’s side,

Gordon poked his cuckold’s chest, that image in his mind.

This hamlet’s, mostly toothless, denizens harbour yet viking genetics

Even as Gordon confronted him, Sam recalled her uphiked hems, ethicless

Attempts at earth-trapping Heaven. Between her fur-trapper legs, begging

Ox-strong with salmon-cunning, none finer abroad the stretch

And she had taken him, Sam Cunningham Wilder, to her quiet bed

Her bitten lip evoked one lemontongued

A summoner’s rapture caps her distance when she cums

Afterward she is forthcoming briefly, before her armour recomes.

Gordon recited glumly his observations

Do his flying visits to the courts of excise not oft coincide

With the pot-moulder’s wife’s trips to old Moulden on Rye

Where Sam lived alone in a cottage bone white

With nice flowerbeds outside, and nice beds inside?

Such focus on matters transient. A bowerbird’s stylings

Masquerading as a stylite.

Sam remembered her heightened Novemberine paleness beneath the ivy-inviting skylight

Made utterly fae, his own uncanny faded painting.

Her timeless beauty to him recalled: phonographs hooting,

Star-hearted cowboys displaying gargantuan thunderbirds in photographs.

Sam buried beyond recollection her uprided skirts, her prideless searching

For hidden blisses. Falsely thinking themselves mist-robed and unmissed.

His buried erection. Their growing obsession. Churchback kisses.

Gordon’s subtle chiding chimed kindly, even childish

But his molten fireish eye upbraided Sam’s craven pleasures,

Whose mindback’s backing track was straining leather’s crack.

Their elbows were locked like arms lop-stymied

For what felt like forever.