Issue 4: November 2003
David L Briggs | Carrie Etter | Roddy Lumsden | Liane Strauss | Frances Williams
RODDY LUMSDEN
Letter From an Admirer
Dear Mr Lumsden, your mention in a poem
of loveless marriage sang out to me, but instead
shall I mention how a hooded crow
makes both dining chair and dinner of a lamb's head,
that fat house spiders will gestate in a schoolboy's ear,
how the frogfish awaits its prey, nine hours, stone-still,
that the red-eyed hyena, padding dust on a trail,
has a conscience that swings between zero and nil.
Specific Hunger
It's not enough to say a briny air
coasts off the gorge, that my downstairs neighbour
is basting a crisp-coated broiler,
that garlic and cardamom ghost on my hands
from the weekend's wondrous korma —
at times the craving is narrowed down,
shaved to a pill, hunted across fields to a den
where it surrenders and reveals itself
as chicken in soy sauce from that takeaway
long since demolished; the unlikely delicacy
of tinned risotto bubbled in its can;
sweet deep-fried sausages from a chip shop
on the back roads of Fife circa '71.
My eyes are gloomed with lust, my mouth is rife,
the belly keening. Some of us mourn the loss
of such salt tongue blessings, part savour
and part pity, which we will not taste again:
musky pakora sauce sublimating on my wrists
as I drifted home across The Meadows;
a lentil soup so true I knelt and wept.
Us
The usual entertainments. The brazen tune
of sticks along a fence. The silt of hunger.
Ablution's waltzes; the neat bolt well-oiled
on the door-back. A collie pup moping
on the smell of onion gravy. The bell-pull
lurching as we dip into the corner shop
for cheddar cheese or toffees or green soap.
Solid stuff. Our pith and quintessence.
The saga of our neighbour's leaning shed.
A tinfoil square on the grill. Adrift, a pool
of coppers in an ashet. Us. A red rosette
on a jelly jar. Milk snuffling in a pan.
The wooden rule suspended on a nail.
The sewing tin. Tinned salmon. Those who can.
Roddy Lumsden's 'New & Selected Poems' will be published by Bloodaxe in 2004.
Available from Amazon.co.uk:
Roddy Lumsden is Dead (Wrecking Ball Press, 2001).
The Book of Love (Bloodaxe, 2000).
Yeah Yeah Yeah (Bloodaxe, 1997)