Jammy Dodger by Kevin Smith

a tagline and added that his wee sheep had ‘had the heart of a lion’. Cut and print! Pure poetry. I stubbed out my smoke. Hope he remembered to clean his teeth. I wondered what it would be like to kiss a sheep. Quite nice probably. Soft lips.

PART TWO
    Come live with me, and be my love, / And we will all the pleasures prove / That hills and valleys, dale and field, / And all the craggy mountains yield  …
    For some reason these couplets were drifting through my head as I walked, and I was thinking, he certainly promised a lot in that poem, old Marlowe’s shepherd: melodious birds, fragrant posies, pretty lambs, silver dishes, dancing swains, and – what has to be the clincher – fair lined slippers . The question for the object of his affections I suppose was, pro tanto quid retribuamus? This was not a love poem (no wedding rings on the table) – it was a lust poem. And that got me thinking about love/lust poetry in general.
    There were all the flowery ones, needless to say, and I’d used my fair share of Keats & Co. to advantage over the years but, increasingly, succinct was the way ahead for me. (It’s what’s left unsaid that breaks the heart.) Love, like happiness, it seems, is in sharpest focus when half-glimpsed – in margins and interstices – lending itself to the subordinate clause, the short lyric, the apercu. On me your voice falls as they say love should, / Like an enormous yes . Hard to beat that one (verging on zen archery). Who else? Shakespeare’s sonnets? Rilke? Whitman? Gravesie, of course, lord of the love lyric: Love is universal migraine, / A bright stain on the vision / Blotting out reason . And the other symptoms? Leanness, jealousy, laggard dawns, omens and nightmares. All very familiar. Could you endure such pain / At any hand but hers? These are the questions.
    And the sexy stuff … who were we talking about? That saucy one, Come Slowly, Eden , by Emily Dickinson with the fainting bee / reaching late his flower … How did it go? Round her chamber hums / Counts his nectars – alights / And is lost in balms! Oh Emily! And let’s not forget Mr Cummings (you couldn’t make it up) and his i like my body when it is with your body. Very hard to recall, old E.E. How does he put it? i like kissing this and that of you … blah, blah, something about slowly stroking the shocking fuzz / of your electric fur … Can’t remember the next bit either, goes on about eyes being big love-crumbs, and then the thrill / of under me you so quite new . Phew. Warm today. I looked up. Trickles of smoke on the hillside. Gorse fires.
    I was passing a delicatessen where racks of fruit and vegetables had been stacked on the pavement under a striped awning and sprayed with water. It was fresh and cool under there. Oxygen-rich. I paused to survey the produce, inhaling the earthy scents. I was thirsty so I bought a nectarine to eat on the way. Not counting a strawberry milkshake at Oliver’s it was the first fruit I’d had in a fortnight.
    Now, where was I? Ah yes, love poems. I briefly wondered whether I was cynically trawling my archives for something that might be useful with Rosie at a later date, but discarded the notion. She was nice though, and the first woman I had found myself thinking about on waking for a long while – usually a reliable indicator.
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    I had reached the mouth of ‘Loyalist Sandy Row’ and as I passed across it I could see, further down, men up a ladder busy with decorations to mark the Twelfth of July. The street was already criss-crossed at lamp-post level with lines of red-white-and-blue bunting, looping like an outsized cat’s cradle. Strings of dragons’ teeth. In the distance, above a clutter of rooftops, a sloping patch of Black Mountain undulated behind a slight heat haze.
    So, the Twelfth was nearly upon us once again. Somehow, it had slipped my mind but now I realised why the