The Coupy
rigwelted
spun
like how an owl reaching out its feet to catch the mouse is for a moment suspended in total space
far welter’d
topped
like how a bee that has stung stabs at the sky for ground but finds no lasting strength
she lay there
starey pupils rolled and red
stiff but for wind
blustering soft warbling wool
she lay there
like how a leaf torched with brown curls in the breeze as it turns and drifts far away from where it ought to be
she lay there
in the shadow of an oak tree
mouth dribbling dry cud
onto patched living land
her milk belly soft
swollen with smooth pitterings
stretch lines arching
over pink shining tips
she lay there
cast down
like how a ewe on its back will writhe and kick and cry and slow and sway and then
when enough of a moment has passed
become entirely
still
What the Poet Says
There are a lot of farming words: old words tied to specific rural scenes, mashed up in a certain dialect and place. I was interested to explore one of these words, a ‘coupy’ (noun), which to my region is a sheep stuck on its back and unable to roll over. These “spun” sheep, due to excessive wool or poor weight control, can choke like that with their stomachs upturned. Any sheep farmer will tell you this. I remember, when we first bought Ryeland’s, the man in the flat cap told us not to get too attached as sheep always find some way to die.
As I went down this rabbit (sheep?) hole, I found more words that meant the same thing in different local dialects. “Topped”, “rigwelted”, “cast”, “far welter’d”, all capture that image of the struggling sheep which otherwise has no dictionary word. Farmers need this language for precision. To ‘coup’ (verb) is used as ‘to turn over’ and so to say “last night when I went to put the ewes out, I found one of the girls couping and just managed to save her” becomes a valid if shocking story. The universality of the word (spoken in so many different dialects) suggests a need for this vocabulary in everyday life. Perhaps this is due to the financial implications of a ‘couped’ (adjective) sheep and the impact this could ultimately have on a family’s livelihoods. Furthermore, the tragedy of the coupy is that it most often occurs with pregnant sheep and so the loss is twofold. There is also something to be said here about the function of words to provide clear images that can be quickly understood, especially in emergencies.
As I explored this, the poem became a way to unpick the ability of written language to capture an experience. This is the weird process of poetry. You begin with what you think a poem is going to be, that you are talking about one word and the strangeness of rural language, and you end up writing Homeric similes to memorialise an animal. The Homeric similes themselves were inspired by a reading I attended of Alice Oswald’s “Memorial”, in which she eulogises the deaths of ordinary Greek soldiers during the Trojan War with grand looping similes. The longevity of the similes in my own poem, reaching out across the page, gave me space to linger in the moment of loss and turn over the imagery of death in different ways. I am saying the death of the animal is like this, or is it in-fact like this, or is it all of these at once, or none of them.
By the end of the poem, I am stripping back the pretence of figurative language. The final simile becomes a literal version of events, attempting to capture those awful final moments in vivid verbs. It is a kind of casting off of that figurative space. Here is that image one more time in its raw dictionary English. In this way, each stanza, and each line, become a different way of writing about the same thing. This is the power of poetic language and something you would never get away with in strict prose.
Well never say never, there are such things as prose poems after all.
Fin