A lufly May afternoon in the year nineteen hundred and sixty-eight,
a lufly with nary a cloud above, with a sweet breeze upon the street,
our small escort brought the two preeminent poets from Scotland,
Hugh MacDiarmid, whose equally held fierce commitments
to Karl Marx and Scottish nationalism often brewed him a cup o' trouble,
and Norman MacCaig, inseparable from MacDiarmid in friendship,
yet separate in so many ways and degrees as to ignite vivid arguing,
the recently retired headmaster in a woollen suit of heaviest weave,
the diminutive communist in tartan kilt, tweed jacket cut at the waist,
plaid hose below his pipe-stem white leggys, a Balmoral bonnet on his top,
the twa poets we brought, after their splendid readings at LIU
in their glittering English and synthetic Scots, we brought them
to a colleague's apartment in Brooklyn Heights well-stocked with Scotch.
The twa poets were no strangers to us and Brooklyn, nor we to them,
their having been invited two years afore to the university's historic
International Writers Conference, at which they deplaned in a state
...