… unless it was love of the bottle. Word was
he’d drunk the family farm, acre
by acre, till a neighbour took the shell
of the house for a shelter. The smell
of him: soiled coat and pants, face
rain-cudgelled and ogre-fierce; he’d
shout after those that taunted, loose
foul words from whiskey stupors, spittle
white lava round a cavernous mouth.
He pitched for a while the bones of a camp
in a copse, found it kicked asunder,
found it burned out. His corpse
was dragged from the Dargle last winter;
drowned pulling his dog from the water.