The Bucket of Blood
(being a hostelry on the road out of Phillack)

The story tells of the Innkeeper’s daughter pulling a bucketful from the well, getting half a gallon of blood, not the Cornish water he expected. All parts of a smuggler, pulled out at a time from that hole, before the water table could recover. Nothing ever proved, of course. Could have been run-off from a mine, could have been lad larks with a pint of paint. But then, if you listen to the codger in the corner, could also be a dragon’s stash; you can hear her footfall and her baited breath on evenings of sea mist.

Husband and Wife Shop

‘They were spraying the sky again last night’
says the owner of the organic farm shed.
‘You can’t tell me it was ice crystals from wing tips.

‘We check the chicken husbandry. Their welfare
is fine, they walk out, are never in two-tier sheds.
There’s a big one in the freezer’.

‘That book’s from a good guy. Local.
He knows his stuff, has done his research.
Medical Fascism, just £10. You’ve got to know’.

‘Toasted sesame oil, chocolate-coated rice cakes,
We try and keep a good range in. The green labels
show which veg is organic. Eight types of potatoes’.

‘We’ve all been lied to, only a few of us
are wise to their smears. The shed’s lined with foil’.

Guide Book

We make the walk to Men an Tol
as we did when Matt and Tom were small,
could climb through the Polo mint of stone,
rather than crawl through, puddle to puddle.

It’s still there. Very still,
if you exclude the gusts that shiffle
the heather, the cold shower
pattering on our storm coats.

I check the dodgy guidebook
which has led us wrong before,
complain about the stonechat
in the illustration of the Meyn.

‘So where is that?’, I say, and a small bird –
black cap, cherry chest, lands
on a gorse bush, not two metres off,
checks us out, blows away.

That’s one query answered, but doesn’t solve
St Michael’s Mount in the picture background.
All you can see from here is the engine house
of the Greenburrow mine, pinned to the long horizon.