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Extracts from
The Waistband and other poems
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Scottish Colourism
These are the good days
poems
piling
up
nicely
living simply
simply
living
in all this sun
while May
rattles its tin at June
like a Swedish flag
day
but 'Scotch' tomatoes
to
slice
with
salt
on rye toast
(a healthy re-
pect these days for the heart disease, etc)
leaving the cork
in the wine bottle a while
apricots and tea and
books of an afternoon
mornings of work
you wish would never end
as if a favourite
Freeling Simenon or Chandler
Odd intervals on the blond guitar
convivial and exacting as
Li Po's lute. Solitude and
old friends
phone calls few, but festive
finally,
finely,
the essential balance
If you will
'The Way'
what I had in mind anyhow when
I told the aye sure sceptics
that I meant it
about the change
This incomparable lazy,
May -
zy
month's end evening
while I walked
between the sun smoored
hours of 6 and 8
my loggings were
Wych Elm
Sycamore
White Alder
and
The Common
Lime
Blinded by blossoms in the
Oriental dell at the Kelvin's
edge, a young woman and her boyfriend
rehearse a Driving Test viva.
From the bridge on Kirklee Road
While the gloaming coyly folded itself
like a fan
I gawped up at the window
in which repatriated from the
Riviera, J. D. Ferguson
laid it on thick
for his Japaneasy women.
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