Roddy Lumsden's piece from his new collection, Not All Honey (Bloodaxe Books, £9.95), turns from the consolations of art to the comfort of artful consolation.

WOMEN IN PAINTINGS

The masters laboured - all the hours of the clock -

to clone the ringlets of a marchioness or pull

a cape of dark around the head of an ecstatic saint.

Portraiteers talked low and long to captive sitters,

so Boleyn's swan neck can still be kissed, Jill

last in a steel blue frock, before my parents met.

And in Sous Bois, Corot threw down a lilac twister

of a sunstreak, through which the bonneted girl

is ever about to step, daydreaming of candied fruit.

Day yields to dusk. The artful lie takes awful work.

We strive for words from the loath core of our will:

You will be loved again. Everything'll be all right.