Tractor

The tractor stands frozen - an agony

To think of. All night

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 stands

In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness.

It defied flesh and won't start.

Hands are like wounds already

Inside armour gloves, and feet are unbelievable

As if the toe-nails were all just torn off.

I stare at it in hatred. Beyond it

The copse hisses - capitulates miserably

In the fleeing, failing light. Starlings,

A dirtier sleetier snow, blow smokily, unendingly, over

Towards plantations Eastward.

All the time the tractor is sinking

Through the degrees, deepening

Into its hell of ice.

The starting lever

Cracks its action, like a snapping knuckle.

The battery is alive - but like a lamb

Trying to nudge its solid-frozen mother -

While the seat claims my buttock-bones, bites

With the space-cold of earth, which it has joined

In one solid lump.

I squirt commercial sure-fire

Down the black throat - it just coughs.

It ridicules me - a trap of iron stupidity

I've stepped into. I drive the battery

As if I were hammering and hammering

The frozen arrangement to pieces with a hammer

And it jabbers laughing pain-crying mockingly

Into happy life.

And stands

Shuddering itself full of heat, seeming to enlarge slowly

Like a demon demonstrating

A more-than-usually-complete materialization -

Suddenly it jerks from its solidarity

With the concrete, and lurches towards a stanchion

Bursting with superhuman well-being and abandon

Shouting Where Where?

Worse iron is waiting. Power-lift kneels

Levers awake imprisoned deadweight,

Shackle-pins bedded in cast-iron cow-shit.

The blind and vibrating condemned obedience

Of iron to the cruelty of iron,

Wheels screeched out of their night-locks -

Fingers

Among the tormented

Tonnage and burning of iron

Eyes

Weeping in the wind of chloroform

And the tractor, streaming with sweat,

Raging and trembling and rejoicing.