by Gerry Cambridge

Dandy
          for my father and grandfather

As he got older he grew
increasingly more
flamboyant in dress,
out of a youth

of mud and leaves, the truth
not in a cloth or cut —
he’d worn whatever
was unemphatic, plain,

his mind a twig
for birds to light on.
In a wood he was the wood;
in a field, a hare in rain.

Now, citied, he will ask
is it a day for the jacket of starling–egg,
or the green,
or the cream,

and the trousers the hue
of a primrose petal
or, the opposite of those
years a Bellshill Irishman

spent burrowing in dark,
of a lark–indulging blue ?
Oh airiness,
Oh light–ness,

the darker he grew,
the closer to ground,
the bloomier and more
of the sunlit world

the clothes he wore.
Smiling to think
of gaiety misattributed, and not
due to a paternal line

mouldering below . . .
Time, time enough
to put on the jacket
of soil or fire

and join that line from
the privilege of being
able to pick,
go out through the world,

bright as a finch,
before choice ends;
honouring skulls
in cashmere and linen.

by Gerry Cambridge

After a long absence
my uncle arrived
one night across the sea
from Ireland. Some terrible thing
had happened. Frost had streaked
his sideburns with delicate care,
single strand by strand.
I had not seen him for a year.
Although a child, I knew
a wintrier air
had laid its hand on him.
I stared as he ate supper.

Here on the Ayr train
travelling to the old woman
my mother has become,
who served that supper to him,
something about the way
my hands rest on my knee
under its threadbare corduroy
bring this memory back. Tonight
I am that man of all those years ago
coming in out of the dark
across the sea.

by Jane McKie

When I get to the hot country I fling my sunhat down,
letting my forehead bake to the gold of gooseberry piecrust.
My arms will soon burn, soaking up the pain of stoves,
because heat, here, is a bubbling, easeful substance.
I won’t have children. I’ll tell my husband to call me
by a new name. We’ll build on lava plains, eating creatures
that scurry past our front door. Relatives back home
will know the most minimal of postcard–musings,
less legible each year, or — even better — just that name,
which is, sentimentally, the name of a flower I can never grow.

by Jane McKie

I dash from the pump:
unseasonable hail
has begun to javelin
on the forecourt,
perfume of petrol
turned to freezing junk.

Not far, but in those yards
I dribble out through
rubber soles,
collapsing at the till:
a bad place for tears,
for the certainty
that grief heals
only to become unstuck —
beside foil wrappers
under strip–lighting.

But the stout boy’s kind,
hallowing my hand
with my change, my receipt,
giving me strength
to drive the hours home
in spite of the sleet.