The Wichita Lineman

Some people have no poetry in their lives and cannot find it; others have it without looking for it or perhaps wanting it; I am fortunate in that I look for it and find it. I spent some time scrubbing the sheep skull that I found on the walk; washing this profoundly strange bone-shape, weird chambers once filled with brains now empty and washed clean of mud, strange wafer-thin blades of bone dividing the head-space into rooms; an odd thought. And this afternoon I cut the grass for the first time this year, a bright and warm afternoon, shirt-sleeves weather, the grass strangely thick, matted. It stained my hands an unfamilar brown-green. I saw a yellow 'hi-viz' jacket in the lane and asked the man if he was lost. But he was an employee of the power company, or whichever branch of it looks after electricity poles. He was a Londoner and stopped for a chat. He had a small electronic hand-pad and a map of poles in the valley, and was on a long series of short journeys to map the electricity poles here. He was checking their condition and whether they needed tree-surgery (ie overhung) or were rotting or weakened. His real paper map was a series of ovals - almost cartouches - and numbers, more like sea charts or radar blips or weather maps than anything relating to geography. He stayed for five minutes, noted the number of the pole (no poles in this valley have proper plastic number tags) and the relationship to the beech tree and the hedges in the lane. His work was awkward, beset with dogs and sheep, and difficult. And yet it seemed to me immensely poetic to see a landscape through something as ordinary as electricity poles, a landscape through dead trees recycled, a whole valley reduced to ovals and numbers and poles. But perhaps it was a good thing he met me cutting the grass, not washing the mud out of a sheep's skull...