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RIDGE
MILL
A
stone’s throw down the field from the Ridge Mill
where
he’d grown man and boy, ran a brook
in
which he and his young wife would bathe
in
poor moonlight when they were first wed.
She
liked the solitude, so she said,
setting
her easel to paint the cave,
the
bare farm sheds where the signposts stood,
the
gale-tormented thorn, the parched hill.
Around
the shire he would mend machines,
his
mind, as ever, not deeply in
the
harrow-tines and carburettors,
but
for once on home as not before:
a
real home, which he mutely saw
transmogrified
by her louche colours,
lurid
in the burning paraffin,
as
was the brook, too, and all her scenes.
They
did not speak much and he took this
as
comfort, after his kitchen rinse.
One
year on, her paintings took a turn,
torn,
bloody, unrecognisable.
He
gaped but saw no ache. The
pool
on
fire. The raw hill. Fields
red, unfarmed.
Thorn
angered by red snow... After,
once
she
had gone, the pain could not be missed.
Alan
Marshfield
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