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The first I noticed was your thumbnails, large, round and flat, like two plates They were marked with yellowed ridges and covered in grime where they met the cracked tips of your thumbs I couldn’t help looking Perhaps I had sensed it already, in a mere handshake that morning Perhaps that handshake had convinced me to stay and watch you skin the sheep that afternoon?   Not the stench of the two-day-dead ewe, the scuds of wool fallen to the air like a dandelion clock, nor the skin slow peeling back, revealing, not blood-lust   I was so taken by your grimy thumbnails And, I was crouching so close in that lost field one afternoon We had hauled the ewe out of a pit Found dead the previous dawn, her eyes gone, pecked out by the crows The ewe, one of three Frieslandto start up a dairy herd, had been brought on to the island a week before; no one could get near her, not time enough even to give her a name Some thought: she may have starved herself or she sure perished of thirst, seemingly terrified since her arrival, shuddering at the hill edge against a stone wall The farmers think otherwise: redwater, blackleg they mumble like proverbs or curses   She was already well swollen, her legs shooting out like on plastic models of farm animals Rigor mortis sets in almost immediately We had hauled her out of a pit with a blue rope around her shockstuck legs A newly-dug pit crammed with bits to bury: a pram frame, rusted so (And, we had always planned to repair it) Oil barrels: two; rusty too I forget what else I remember that the pit was not as deep as I had expected   Nor had I expected you to reach for some latex gloves, to stretch the opaque white rubber over your hands, your grimy nails, to then pass me a pair And a knife   Dead two days! a neighbouring farmer had laughed The sheep were only there a week, and on the third day he had come round, bringing his ram to cover them: a