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Hazy Alley Incident

By Roddy Lumsden Roddy Lumsden

Eugene, OR

Girl shouting Oliver! at the top of the cut-through

by Jacob’s Gallery, you have now entered

the slenderest of histories, the skin-bound book

I store between my temples; in that mean

and moonless city, you must hang fraught

in your too-long coat, not a winner, but placed,

and in this cutty version of forever, forever

calling on your unseen beau, one flake in

a limbic blizzard, one spark in the synaptic blaze.

And now the rain turns, light but going steady

on the Willamette. Along the bank, I lift my pace

from devil-may-have-me to heading-somewhere

and still your mouth in the haze calling is

a ruby carbuncle woken by a miner’s head-beam,

the reddest berry in the hedgerow, which all

but the bird in the fable know not to pluck.

Source: Poetry (May 2010).

Biography

Roddy Lumsden was born in St. Andrews, Scotland; he describes his upbringing as small-town and working-class. His earliest exposure to literature came from his mother and older brother, who would read aloud to him when he was a child. Later, when he attended school, his writing was influenced by the works of W.S. Graham, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, T.S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath, and by song lyrics.

His work is marked by an . . .

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