Lydia Robb

THE EGG WIFE

The farmhouse door was barred against the sun
its bell gone dumb. When I knocked
a peephole opened its lizard eye then shut.
She let me in, her crossover apron
strung with flecks of straw. I followed her
into a kitchen stolen form the past;
scrubbing board, butter churn cornkist
and a glass-eyed ferret stiffening in its case.
Smoke drizzled down her nostrils. She wiped
each egg, her blackened nails checking for cracks.
Her man barged in, holding a mole
by the tail, blood beading from its snout.
Got the little devil, he punched the air.
The salivating dog skulked at his heels.
Shooing them out, she placed a pale green
duck egg, smooth as marble in my hands,
saying This will make your baker's dozen.
Not long after, he found her in the hen-house
halfway through her last cigarette,
yolk congealing on her rubber boots.
Today, a rusted Fordson blocks the yard.
Bickering hens peck at their own reflections
in the oiled mirror of a stagnant puddle.
His Alsatian sizes me up with manic eye,
testing the strength of his slip chain. He's indoors
alone, watching endless television.

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KELLAS WOODS

Tuesday morning:
snow has worked its magic on the land:
from here to the horizon seamless white.
Two criss-cross vapour trails
dissect the sky into a saltire blue.
A vitrified fern makes its mark
on the powdery drift
that was yesterday's drystane dyke.

Snawbree swells the Sweetwater burn
where a heron lifts into a winter sun
then skirts the boundaries of the wood.
Friday morning: stark calligraphy
of naked branches, spiked with snow.
In a gleam of stolen light,
last night's fly-tippers have invaded.
Below the oak's broken spine,
black bin bags spew their contents;
empty beer bottles, fast-food cartons,
a television face down in the burn
and a cacophony of hoodie crows
reengin through the spoils.

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OCTOBER SHOPPING

Am I one of the graceless
hordes of Saturday shoppers,
bowing to the God of consumerism,
two for the price of one at the end of every aisle?
Exotic fruits; mango, kumquat, figs,
tomatoes ripened on some far off vine.
Dutch butter, French cheese, Australian wine.
Christmas carols, out of season.
Absolution; I cut to the car park,
the still-empty trolley protesting.
The scent of winter in the air
and a sound that catches me by the throat.
I could sacrifice my soul
to this incantation. Wild geese,
skein upon skein, in perfect formation,
winging up the Carse of Gowrie.
If there is a map to all of this,
you might read it in my heart, my bone.
With the coming dark,
I feel the pull and turn for home.

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PEGGY'S HOUSE

I'm in Peggy's house
my bare feet on the prayer mat.
She's pointing out the winding rows
of omegas and the two semicircles
where the knees should be placed,
but almost never are.
Chalk Alsatians, won at the fair,
crouch either end of her mantelpiece
and in between, an alchemy
of yellowed photographs;
the dead child's memory etched in stour.
Above Willie's empty chair,
three plaster ducks, flying in formation
across the pipe-smoked frieze.

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MANTRA

October morning: air shrivelling to nothing.
This is the perfect day for sucking lemons.
Log on to the iron-will website;
chant the mantra for today.
Better to be thin and dead
than fat and living.
She makes a note
to rid herself of the wardrobe mirror.
The nearer she gets, the wider
and more unforgiving it becomes.
Skin transparent as tissue and
thighs wishboned down to size.
Restless as the emaciated cat,
her hands become scales,
weighing the ghost of a future.

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ELEGY FOR A WOULD-BE CARPENTER

The undertaker washing his hands
with invisible soap;
stroking the surface of the coffin lid
like a second skin and you are talked
into buying that misshapen slab
of dark mahogany.

You said you'd make a table that would be
a talking-point. Bizarre, we thought but
you were right into the still-life of the workshop,
thickening the lathe with stour, sanding,
planing, smoothing the edges, coarse as coconut.
For days the house inhaled the smell of resin.

That September morning you were shaving
when a sudden shift of mood
tempered the mirror, your reflection
ghosting through the vapour, back slumped
over the lavatory seat.
Outside the sodium lamp had dimmed its halo.

Splintered blue, the ambulance lights spun
across the morning's retina.
Oxygen-masked, you said you'd watched the world
settle, your mother's voice lapping at the edges
of your senses. Cradled in the canvas
of a stretcher, you were a child again.

Buried under a snow of sheets,
capillaries branching in a tree of life
above your head. Digital red. Bleep. Bleep.
Upriver from Ninewells, a dull sun set.
An autumn haar whitened its bones.
The city glittered in a cold sweat.

Look at you now, adept at DIY dialysis,
cracking thin jokes about your bloated self,
fenced in by bannisters you face the music.
Touch Me In The Morning. Barbara Streisand
fading like quicksilver from your CD player;
that coffee table crouches like a Jonah in the corner.

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DEMOLITION

The JCB performs another trick.
The tenement buckles at the knees;
a pack of cards.

Shards of anaglypta
whirl like ticker-tape along the street.
The windows spit out glass like broken teeth.

A fireplace crouches;
an empty mouth defying gravity.
A frieze of lilac flowers
droops at the hem of one remaining wall.

The Burgh Engineer has had his fill. He joins
the traffic tearing down the dotted lines
of the dual carriageway,
towards the emptiness his wife has left.

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