RODDY LUMSDEN
The Beginning of the End
When my ex-wife found magnetic north
in my sock drawer,
I forecast the beginning of the end.
She invited over the neighbour who found
the centre of gravity
thumbed below the surface of the sugarbowl.
They phoned the police who very soon
were squeezing a slew
of anti-chaos from a Fairy Liquid bottle.
The sniffer dogs weren't far behind them
and made a beeline for
the rug below which lay Grand Unified Theory.
Soon there were swarms of officials
tugging at the missing link,
fingering the blade-sharp end of my Möbius strip.
I knew I'd have their deaths on my conscience
when they opened up
the drying cupboard and found inside
the nine tenths of the iceberg which usually lie
below the water
which I'd been saving up for a rainy day.
Pagan
Such things occur: I am driving back to Dunbar
when Shelley strips naked in the passenger seat
to show me the Celtic serpent tattoo
which twists all over the pale force of her body,
the forked tongue flicking the down of her belly.
You must put your faith in something she says.
Yet what has she done but swap one implausible God
for a full menagerie of impossible ones?
What I believe in are those millions of moments
just before the moments when things go wrong.
I tell her of the night I spent in MacDiarmid's bed
at Brownsbank, snow thick for eerie miles each way;
how I lay and imagined him, alight and magisterial,
swaying on the open-topped night bus north through London;
how coals stirred and settled through the hours of dark.
Shelley sighs, says nothing. For the rest of the journey,
there is only the slow pall of the engine,
the occasional cawing of goddesses, the lowing of gods.
Love's Young Dream
A snowball's chance in hell was what the guys
At work said. Right enough, she had the pick
of any man in town. But what the heck,
I thought: faint heart, fair maid and all that jazz.
You've got to try. You never know your luck.
But when I call her up, she wasn't in.
I left a message on her answer-phone:
Black Bo's, I said, tonight at nine o'clock.
I splashed on Gio, creased my 615s
And gelled my hair up in an Elvis lick.
I strolled along the Cowgate and arrived
Bang on, and at the window table, there
She was! And with her giving me the wink,
The Jewish pope, the constipated bear.
From The Book of Love (Bloodaxe, 2000)
Also available from Amazon.co.uk:
Roddy Lumsden is Dead (Wrecking Ball Press, 2002)
Yeah Yeah Yeah (Bloodaxe, 1997)