Sometimes a good quote hits right between the eyes, you so totally completely overwhelmingly get it, you're suddenly soulmated. However. A number of problems present with my new soulmate, Oscar Wilde, who said, I was working on a proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

When I’m writing I forget everything else. I am doing it right now. I should be thissing and thatting but I am writing, and whatever this is, it’s at a pretty hot gallop right now and I can’t/won’t stop. I get sudden pangs that bring me up for air, sometimes all I need is a snack, other times it’s something due at work so a sort of superpower kicks in and I get it done, so far I still have a job and my house hasn’t been taken over by birds or bees, the grass is greenish and the chickens are laying.

Here’s Part Two of The Fields Next Door. I guess this officially makes it a serial doesn’t it? My aim is to write these so they can be enjoyed individually, so even if you haven’t read Part One, please, have at it.

The Fields Next Door – Part Two by Sherry Cassells

When in a contemplative state, I contemplate to the right. When I walk – and I can see the worn evidence in the fields and along my favourite pathways – I veer to the right. I tilt. My head tilts further, it must look as if I am listening to my shoulder or tuned in to the ground. Like fucking Rain Man. I half-worry that this has caused a curvature in my spine, ever since the Fields moved in next door with their sparkling aura, happy families are my lop-sided Achilles, my wayward Icarus, do their fields grow greener taller richer from love?

I pine. I long. My fields are a flop.

Yet the gardens around the house are glorious, the roses my grandfather crafted almost gruesome with vitality, he could never get them anything but red, when you touch a petal it feels as if you might break skin – what if they are haemophiliac roses? – the beds around the house would look like the hallway in The Shining. Surprising how they are to the touch, they are not the velvet your fingers expect, there’s meat there, that’s the cacti influence of course, and a bit of salt. I didn’t know for a long time that he watered them with a portion of his own tears. I maintain this practice but use table salt.

My grandmother dyed her wool, my grandfather as I said used it in the soil, and still I see colourful worms of it, the birds see it, too, the nests around here are chromatic and the birds orderly, the ones who have made a blue nest keep it blue and likewise for the greenish goldish purplish, the ish due to the seeping dirt, it washes away eventually, colours are peculiar, the blue is never ish.

Mice don’t give a rat’s ass, their bedding quilted in all colours, muted and permanentish.

Jesus I bet you hope I drop that one, I do tend to tend, to fixate, hence the rightness like a magnet, the pull of the Field’s fields – homonyms can be tricky hope you’re okay – the way I write this story down these early mornings it feels as if there’s a weight to the words, as if the page can only handle so many, some days can take more than others. I do not know upon what hangs this balance. I can feel when it’s about to give, I have to carefully finish a thought, the sudden economization not poetry but not not poetry either, and then it says WHEN!

This is a story of my farming years, my barren fields, they were my grandfather’s barren fields before me, he had the soil tested, he studied it, he asked the Quaker guy who bought from neighbouring farms what the problem might be and the Quaker guy, the buyer, said he hadn’t a clue. My grandfather paid for another Quaker guy to come out and assess, the guy said he didn’t understand it, the soil was exactly the same as everywhere else in the region, there were no extraordinary parasites. Have you ever seen soil under a microscope? I would never say those bearded squirms were ordinary. He said maybe it’s the water, but the rain was so plentiful there was no need for watering, but the Quaker guy said the neighbours watered, so my grandfather put in a system, good thing his roses had caught on my then, everybody wanted them like sturdy pets. The water system made some beautiful rainbows, my grandmother said they weren’t the wishing kind, the fields did not improve, could not even cough out a weed.

But they coughed out something else one day, I was on the porch veering, Mrs. Field was living alone by then, she hired me to care for her fields and if that’s not an extension of faith what is, something caught my left eye – I feel a WHEN! coming on – a wink of light from my field, I ran through its failed furrows in a bare foot curve toward the clean and sparkling tip of a jewel, I tried to pick it up believing at the moment it had fallen from a careless beak but it would not budge, I could not determine its colour the sun was so attached to it, my saturated retina held the image and flashed it throughout the field, I waited for this effect to fade but it did not, what I thought were afterimages were actual sparks indicating more jewels. I ran for my shovel, my feet sinking into and pulling out of the mud so rudely and so loudly Mrs. Field, who was hanging laundry next door, stopped mid-swoop and looked my way.

She later said that’s when she fell in love with me but I have to wonder, I mean if you pull that sinking running frantic messy image to the forefront a minute it’s not very appealing is it.

I wonder if she loved me at all.