John hammered and hammered hell-hot iron on his anvil.

Work was slow in the water that summer so what work he had

he struck more art into it. These horseshoes were a set, a double-set,

a dapper pattern, a gift for some girl he had long had his eye on.

There was a slap at the open smithy door and in loped

this lad, not more than sixteen by his skin and under his arm

a woman all wrought wrong like she’d been raddled under a wagon.

The lad asked, ‘Let me a loan of the fire, bellows, anvil and hammers;

and let me work here alone.’ Later the lad looked in on John.

The girl had been made right. She looked more than mended.

John fetched five guineas from him for that fire and free hour.

‘But don’t be doing as you spy others doing. The tatcho drom

to be a jinney-mengro is to shoon, dick and rig in zi,’ the lad warned

holding the girl’s arm as he left. John had a mind to try the lad’s trick,

so tranced up he was by the art of it. He sized up his fresh horseshoes,

squinted through the nail-eyes, all over their harped, heavy angles.

Those shoes might have proved half the art he needed for love

but John had a hidden, beaten shame in him – a hair-wide snick

in his soul’s steel. He couldn’t court the girl with such work.

He doused the smithy-fire, hooped the eight hot rings on a wire

with his hope and walked across the valley to the town for a drink.

A fair was in town. There were posters tigering the shop-windows

and streetlamps. A horse-river ripped through lanes and ginnels.

Cobbles chuckled, shined under that iron tide. Street-silt, sheep-muck

and salt-grit from a slown winter shook up dust devils and mare’s tails.

Rainbow tents and caravans flowered in the river-meadows.

John ran through them to hear their colours, to smell canvas slapping,

guy-ropes springing and pinging on pleached pegs, wounding

scents of grasses into his nostrils, making the penned ponies slaver.

John strove to stand square, to glimpse between dazzling horsecloths,

for there were horses here that John might as well imagine as see

– Andalusians, Spanish Barbs, Lipizzans, Camargues –

three thousand or more with their masters and flexing foals.

And children. The streams, the becks, the waterfalling children

bucketing like water from slamming caravan doors. The horse fair

ran with children. One sleet shout could freeze them before

they thawed to laughter. John looked out over the fair’s field.

He thought he was witnessing the world or one bright field of it

with old counties buried but still breathing beneath counties.

When work was slow in the water you could go and come and go

through the mirrors of these fairs. John’s hammer and hardware

hung jangling on his work-belt. There was always luck to a fair.

 

The fair roved every other week. It was as if the tall tents tucked

up their skirts and scuttled from one field to another. So quick

and sprack and spry were these moonlit flits from village to village

the tent-pegs had barely pushed down a first root before being plucked.

of the birds bubbled and purled over fenland and moorland.

Three skiving summer months John wrestled with, then won,

the trust of the hooves of high horses. For the shyer creatures

he played them the circling game – the send, the allow and the bring back –

then they’d nuzzle him softly for sugar and his salve for whip-cuts.

That gave John the nod of the horse masters, and means for meals,

yet money flapped about the fair, not a note of it settling near John.

He could sniff the stuff wodged in the pockets of the masters’ jackets:

brash, burnished bundles of cash for buying up ponies on the spot.

The masters stank of rancid bank-notes. Their palms were plummy.

Their palms were planed purple with done deals and sure things.

John played a circling game with the horse masters, sending

himself off when wanted most, shying on the end of a lunge line

of their flattery, letting himself be talked back to the fair with a drink

before coming back and laying out the tackle and terms of his trade.

The horse masters answered to no man but their king, a Gypsy himself

who joined John as he worked, enjoying the sound and sight of skill.

As the days drew on, and John’s silence drew him, the king spoke

of his own pain: how last summer his shire horses shied at an adder,

casting their wagon with his one daughter inside it, how since then

she was broken in body, blunt and blind. John asked to take a look.

The daughter was wrought wrong and John thirsted to find favour.

Months back, John had watched that lad gain a girl from the dead

John could keep a look-out on customers with fast fingers. John coaxed

the king’s pain from him with a promise he might mend the daughter,

remake her whole. And if he did, the king said, John might be more

than a brother to the tribe and king. The daughter was given

mashed poppies: stewed slurring flowers in a steaming steel mug

that slid her to sleep. Father and masters kept vigil in their vardos.

All night John had his furnace flaring, its bellows rasping and blasting.

The daughter’s body flamed and melted. Her hair fled, flew up. By dawn

she was all dust. John poured her ash across the anvil. He palmed it,

gathered it, chopped and hammered it. John spat and mixed and waited.

He remembered he could barely remember a word that lad had said.

 

Cockerels were volleying vowels from valley to valley. John sensed

snaps and snags of twigs as deer drew darkly back into the woods.

The furnace grew cool and quiet. The daughter’s ashes were damp.

John was weeping. He was already dead. He listened to the world waking,

eavesdropped dawn’s massacres hooked in an owl’s eyes. Below

cold clay’s skin, moles waged war on each other, twittering, brawling

as blind as worms in their looped, lapsed trenches. John parleyed

with the silence with prayers. The dust stirred on the anvil’s altar.

Blackbirds and thrushes broke their voices in the blue darkness

between tree canopies. Dunnocks drew bows in their throats

and fired music through the walls all around the silent smithy.

John knew in his mind there were nouns to each sound, prayers

was dust. Her ashes on the anvil were asking and answering him.

Then John heard a knock nagging at some distant door.

In leaped the young lad as though through the bare wall

beside the winking anvil. He blinked at John’s work as if he were

staring through the blacksmith, sighting his soul’s hair-wide snick:

‘Man, it’s not her. It’s you need the mending. Didn’t I tell you

not to do what you spied me do? Down tools and watch my work.’

 

The lad plied the daughter’s dust and blew over those grains

until they glowed, embering on the anvil as the lad let slip

sharp sure calls, kind words and calm words. Shamed, John slid

towards the door wandering, still weeping. The lad turned on John,

‘Man, go home and give yourself to a girl who can melt and mend

the tears in you. Love’s the craft of it. The fire from its flint can bend

and make anything find fresh form. But let love circle you, mind.

Love’s no shying horse for the asking and the shoeing. Send

love from you, as you have, and it will not allow that nor come back.’

As he said this the daughter’s dust sparked. It spoored up between

the lad’s arms as he lent art and shape. The daughter woke, melted

into life, leaning into the lad’s neck, breathing his known name.

No Gypsy noticed John as he left, his tools still sulking in his hands.

When John reached home he gloomed for three months, then rose,

woke the flames of his furnace and frenzied a glow with his bellows.

Work was work, but what work he had he struck a lighter heart into it.

with a circling pattern, a gift for a girl he had long ago had his eye on.

John tipped and hammered and tapped those deft shoes on his anvil.

Sunlight leant through the open smithy door and in strode the girl.

 

‘The tatcho drom to be a jinney-mengro is to shoon, dick and rig in zi’: ‘the true way to be a wise man is to hear, see and bear in mind’.