fieldwork

Monday 20th July 2009 12:24 AM

One of the black hens has been secretly egg-sitting under the caravan and yesterday afternoon I met her and her six hyper-cute fluffy newborns grubbing for food in the shade of my new poet's car. (It's a Toyota Palindrome 1.62)

I looked under some of the bigger plant-pots until I found them a worm and a few wood-lice and then I called Mark the farmer on my mobile and kept an eye on them while he came over with a big green bucket and a cricket bat. Mark told me that in the UK, more people are killed by hens than any other farm animal, and when they've got young ones with them they're especially dangerous, so he asked me to guard him with the cricket bat while he deftly but gently lifted the chicks into the big green bucket.

The whole operation only lasted a minute but the sheer tension of it left me exhausted. At one point I thought the hen was going to fly into his face and slash his jugular open with one deadly sweep of its powerful talons, and leave him lying in the sun like a sticky burst fruit, but instead it just hunched its shoulders a bit, and clucked.

Afterwards, as a libation to the gods to honour their protection, but also to extend that delicious atmosphere of shared manliness, we shared a pot of Orange Pekoe China rose-petal tea and watched the field through the caravan picture-window. The field looked back at us unblinkingly with its big green eye, kohl-rimmed with hedge-shadow, its iris daisy-flecked and tufty, busy with birds and bugs and cluttered up with buttercups.

Under the steady green gaze of that ancient pasture we enjoyed the swaying yellow waves of massed ragwort and the soft random hop of occasional rabbit. Mark said that in the UK, more buttercups are killed by rabbits than any other cute wild animal, and when they've got young ones with them, they're even cuter.

The field's eye was so open and honest, we started calling it Frank, and it was as though all it's to-ings and fro-ings and little dramas were somehow telling us the very soul-story of the planet.

Looking deeply into nature's grassy optic through the magnifying glass of our imaginations, we felt like analogous iridologists, diagnosing war in the east from the movement of crows and seeing potential peace in the slow patience of nettles.

Entranced by this cavalcade of mythical truth, we lost all track of time, until we noticed that the sky had put on a rather attractive pink negligee and was obviously wanting to go to bed. Mark got out of his chair, saying that even though we'd established that the universe was fundamentally made of consciousness, he still had to go and feed the hens.

With magnetic, strawberry, morphic, Gracie and W.C., there's still many different fields out there to explore, but for now I'm happy with the one outside my caravan window. Sometimes, for a joke, I call it Frank Eye-Field.