Roddy Lumsden

Into perplexity: as an itch chased round an oxter or early man in the cave mouth watching rain-drifts pour from beyond his understanding. Whether to admire the mere sensation, enough, or hold out for sweeter ornament, vessels of wonder born with that ur-charm of symmetry; lovely ones we ache to prize and praise, climb into and become because they try our day-by-day significance: some of us ugly and most of us plain, walked past in the drowned streets: pearls of paste, salted butter, secondary colors. They drift unapproached, gazed never-selves, blunt paragons of genetic industry. We desire them but cannot want such order. We stand, mouths open, and cannot help stammering our secrets, nailed to water.

I realise it’s not all salad sandwiches at pinewood picnics, endless volleyball. I’ve heard the argument that talk of shame and how our forebears thought their bodies dirty; how we've all got one. Seen one, seen ’em all. But it’s not for me, beneath my double load of Calvinist and voyeuristic tendencies. For me, I have to see the clothes come off: the way a button’s thumbed through cotton cloth - a winning move in some exotic game with no set rules but countless permutations - or how a summer dress falls to the floor with momentary mass and with a plash that stirs us briefly as we ply our passion; a hand pushed through the coldness of a zip, three fingertips that follow down the spine to where a clasp is neatly spun undone amidkiss, by prime legerdemain and who cares that it happens once in four and never, never on the first undressing, it must be better than a foreskin snagged on gorse thorns or a cold, fat nipple jammed in the scissor drawer, the bounty and the blessing, the mystery of nakedness reduced till on a par with go-go palaces where goosebumped, grinding strippers strut their stuff in the birthday clothes of backstreet empresses, down on a par with the oncologist who gropes for lumps, the night-morgue man who clips his nails amongst the naked, bin-bagged stiffs. So, stranger, what I want to say is this: if you’re to join me in a little sinning (and this is my place up here on the right), please understand I’d value some reluctance, a cold-feet shiver, as in the beginning when Eve discovered modesty and slipped in and out of something comfortable. For there are many ways to skin a cat, but ours is human nature - things come off so rarely. Come in. Let me take your coat.

Don't say Sir Pigeon in his cobalt bonnet. Don't find among your notes jottings on duvets and blizzards and the page unwalked across black missives of girlhood must be sent off and do not claim the furnace of the universe is powered by human screams. When the dark turns dark or when the bullet lifts a scalp, it is enough to know the lover feels the slap that the world can hear the sharp shout which wakes the cat her claws one inch from the rabbit's bobbing scut.

After the Yoruba Though the amaryllis sags and spills so do those my wishes serve, all along the town. And yes, the new moon, kinked there in night's patch, tugs me so—but I can't reach to right the slant. And though our cat pads past without a tail, some with slinking tails peer one-eyed at the dawn, some with eyes are clawless, some with sparking claws contain no voice with which to sing of foxes gassing in the lane. Round-shouldered pals parade smart shirts, while my broad back supports a scrubby jumper, fawn or taupe. The balding English air their stubble while some headless hero sports a feathered hat. I know a man whose thoroughbred grazes in his porch for want of livery. There are scholars of Kant who can't find Kent on the map, and men of Kent who cannot fathom Kant. We who would polish off a feast have lain late in our beds, our bellies groaning, throats on fire. We who'd drain a vat of wine have drunk our own blood for its sting. Each of us in tatters flaunts one treasured garment flapping in the wind.