Two rather startling Edinburgh tableaux from Norman MacCaig’s A Man in my Position (mostly 1967-86), included in the poet’s magisterial posthumous collection of poems, edited by his son Ewen (Polygon, £25hardback). For once the minister is dancing, not skating!
RECLINING FIGURE BY HENRY MOORE:
BOTANIC GARDENS, EDINBURGH
It was the place that it was in
And was in what the place was. So
Its dinosaurish head poked out
Into the twentieth century.
~
It seemed as though it had been left,
Defying momentariness,
A glacial deposit, by
A geology of ancestors.
~
Yet it was, too, one mass of these
Douce citizens sprawled on the grass -
See them, ferocious ratepayers
Flirting with lovely dinosaurs.
~
DANCING MINISTER
In a one-two-three
she waltzes by, big as a brigantine.
~
Her tug, with a red-hot smokestack,
is short of tonnage, is short of horsepower.
~
She has no visible means
of propulsion. She drifts
curvaceously on
invisible swirlings and eddies.
~
A passing tug hails them: ‘Minister,
what would St Luke think of you now?’
~
The parson sweats. Theology
Was nothing to this.
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