He first saw her from afar —
tramping across the field, a kind of moving statue,
a girl heavy in good places.
He scrambled up a pollarded tree to mark her shape
and direction. He'd fallen from trees before. This time
despite the ale, he hung on.
Even from a distance he knew she'd look
fine milking cows. Her sturdy form, those hands
would draw the milk, would work the teats.
High in the tree, he was more besotted than a bird,
and happier. His eyes followed her vanishing
over the grassed horizon. He climbed to earth,
penned two poems to her beauty. Anyone in love
will recognize this, the heart's highest moment, this ledge
of clock before the beloved's mouth
opens and awry things go and go until the end of time.
But there'd be buckets to fill with wildflowers,
the greensward to harvest, before that befell them,
her name to discover. Could she love a lime-burner?
Like any decent girl she'd send him away.
But he'd return. Until then, in his choking
shifts at the kiln she'd cross that pasture in his mind
a thousand times and what he began to think was,
she walked like someone who could read.
About this Poem
Jeanette Lynes is the author of six collections of poetry and one novel, The Factory Voice. Her seventh book of poems, Bedlam Cowslip: The John Clare Poems, has just been published by Wolsak and Wynn in November 2015, and will receive its local launch 7-9 p.m. on Monday, December 14 at Novel Idea.
Jeanette is coordinator of the MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan. "The Day John Clare Fell in Love (1818)" was first published in The New Quarterly.
