Hypothesis
a box of lights, a jar of copper nails,
cats' bones and feathers
an arm's length into the chimney.
the edges wander and blur,
convolvulus winds through the roses, the violets drift,
spotting the ditches with colour beyond the canal.
in the blood-orange light,
leaving his kill: the wet pelt, the frost-threaded eyes,
the bones in the ceanothus, becoming dust,
the sudden precision of gunshots out in the field,
when the woods are immersed
in a clear and improbable dawn,
bonemeal and horsehair, a fingerprint etched in the
dust,
whatever it is that fades when we enter a room,
leaves only the glitter of brass , and the gloved noise of
water.
The Pit
Town in Winter
Everything would vanish in the snow,
fox bones and knuckles of coal
and dolls left out in the gardens,
red-mouthed and nude.
We shovelled and swept the paths,
but they melted away in the night
and the cars stood buried and dumb
on Fulford Road.
We might as well be lost, she said;
and saw them wrapped in overcoats and scarves
on Sundays: careful, narrow-footed souls,
become the creatures of a sudden light,
amazed at how mysterious they were.
Everything would vanish in the snow,
fox bones and knuckles of coal
and dolls left out in the gardens,
red-mouthed and nude.
We shovelled and swept the paths,
but they melted away in the night
and the cars stood buried and dumb
on Fulford Road.
We might as well be lost, she said;
and saw them wrapped in overcoats and scarves
on Sundays: careful, narrow-footed souls,
become the creatures of a sudden light,
amazed at how mysterious they were.
Blues
It’s moments like this
when the barman goes through the back
and leaves me alone
a radio whispering
somewhere amongst the glasses
- I’m through with love -
the way the traffic slows
to nothing
how all of a sudden
at three in the afternoon
the evening’s already begun
a nascent
dimming.
By ten I’ll be walking away
on Union Street
or crossing Commercial Road
in a gust of rain
and everyone who passes
will be you
or almost you
before it’s someone else.
It’s moments like this
when the barman goes through the back
and leaves me alone
a radio whispering
somewhere amongst the glasses
- I’m through with love -
the way the traffic slows
to nothing
how all of a sudden
at three in the afternoon
the evening’s already begun
a nascent
dimming.
By ten I’ll be walking away
on Union Street
or crossing Commercial Road
in a gust of rain
and everyone who passes
will be you
or almost you
before it’s someone else.
The
Inner Ear
It never
switches off; even asleep
We listen in to gravity itself.
Crossing
a field is one long exercise
in equilibrium - a player’s grace -
though
what we mean by that
has more to do
with
music
than the physics we imagine.
A
history of forest and the murk
of oceans, nice
adjustments
in the memory of bone
lead us
to this: the gaze;
the upright form.
Lemur
and tree-shrew linger in the spine
becoming steps; a track worn in the grass;
A
moment’s pause
before the rain moves in.
We listen in to gravity itself.
in equilibrium - a player’s grace -
has more to do
than the physics we imagine.
of oceans, nice
in the memory of bone
the upright form.
becoming steps; a track worn in the grass;
before the rain moves in.
Being
and Time
There
are times when I think
of the knowledge we had as children:
the
patterns we saw in number, or the spells
and recipes we had
for love and fear;
the
knowledge we kept in the bones
for wet afternoons,
the slink of tides, the absolutes of fog,
or how a
lapwing’s egg can tip
the scale of the tongue;
how
something was always present in the snow
that fell between our parish and the next,
a
perfect thing, not what was always there,
but something we knew without knowing, as we knew
that
everything was finite and alive,
cradled in warmth against the ache of space,
marsh-grass
and shale, and the bloodroot we dug in the woods
that turned our fingers red, and left a stain
we kept
for weeks, through snow and miles of sleep,
as if it was meant to happen, a sliver of fate
unstitching its place in the marrow, and digging in.
of the knowledge we had as children:
and recipes we had
for love and fear;
for wet afternoons,
the slink of tides, the absolutes of fog,
the scale of the tongue;
that fell between our parish and the next,
but something we knew without knowing, as we knew
cradled in warmth against the ache of space,
that turned our fingers red, and left a stain
as if it was meant to happen, a sliver of fate
unstitching its place in the marrow, and digging in.
The
Painter Fabritius Begins Work on the Lost Noli Me Tangere of 1652
I
This is the myth we chose to do without;
and surely the painter imagined the garden he shows
as blue-green and mandarin – the improbable fruits
and blossoms; the patient birds;
the held breath of the shade–
surely he imagined it
with no one in the foreground but himself:
a scene from childhood, say, or early love; a moment’s
homesick reinvention, not quite true, and yet
more trusted than the authorised account.
It seems so much a pretext for the real:
that dove in the upper branches, that wisp of cloud,
those children in the distance playing quoits
or calling out from one hedge to the next
the only names they know in all the world.
It seems so much a pretext for the given:
less gospel than the brilliant commonplace
of all we take for granted, vines and thorns
and morning dew receding in the grass;
that gold light in a stand of tamarisk; woman and man
arriving at this moment, not by chance,
and not quite by design, their puzzlement
the first step in a lifelong discipline
of knowing what they can and cannot touch,
what goes unspoken and what must be told:
a local sound – though everything is one –
the smell of hyacinths, a veil of bees
the closed wound and the healed: this
II
afterlife.
The woman cannot speak. She has no words.
Nothing she sees is true until a man
confirms her story; not one man, but four,
when giving evidence before a judge:
a man to echo everything she says,
a man to write it down and make it holy.
So what we hear is always second-hand:
as one man tells another of a scene
he never witnessed, spelling out in words
the mysteries of touch and nothingness
– and this is what we choose to do without
this testimony: upright men and true
speaking an authorised version: sexless; untouched.
They misunderstand what she says.
They make it new;
retell it for the version they will write
as gospel, passed from one mouth to the next
till something whole and vivid has emerged:
the empty shroud; the angel in the tomb
the resurrected man so like himself
his twin could dip three fingers in the wound
to feel the warmth – and all she memorised,
retold in altered form, is true enough;
if anything is true that can be told
when so much of the whole has been omitted.
III
The painting says the dead cannot be touched;
nothing is carried over, nothing is held,
even the people we love must steal away
in other guises: shadows in the dust
or something gone adrift between the trees,
lost in the wind, or the light of transmigration
– and this is how the spirit brings itself
to step aside: a gift to the unknown
since life itself is seamless and entire
tendon and bone remembering decay
as seeds remember trees, eggs conjure flight.
The real unmakes itself in every hand
that reaches out to touch and grasps thin air:
that newborn stranger hurrying away
to other facts, unhindered by desire
this wisp of smoke
this song
this tilt of bells.
IV
The painter cares for nothing but the light:
the patterns he knows; the shapes of this
commonplace magic; acres of grass,
or the shadows in a stand of citrus trees
between this moment and the middle ground.
This is his single chance to catch a glimpse
of how the soul continues, how it steps
from one life to another, almost touched
by what it leaves behind: a naked thing
the woman half-mistakes for wind, or song.
Irrational perhaps – and yet for years
he’s carried in his nerves that other self
who might have come in some bright parallel,
a purer logic drawing out the form
he cradled in his chest with each held breath.
Irrational – yet what seems fixed in us
is haunted by a voice we never hear
and if the self is fixed what soul there is
is always something else, a practised craft
that ventures ounce by ounce upon its world
the way a skater ventures on to ice
one heartbeat at a time
– and if the self
were noun, what soul there is
is like a voice before it starts to speak
returning as they say we must return
in one form then another: cat, then bird,
then spider in the angle of the wall,
weaving a trap for flies, and at the last
the blue spark of a fly, some autumn night,
flickering out, the relict of this fire
becoming water, moonshine, flecks of dust,
time after time and each time a smaller goodbye.
V
Alone for the first time in weeks
and starting again on something he’d almost abandoned
he’s thinking of the time he saw a girl
on the frost-whitened rink of the green
one hard December morning: not quite dawn
his neighbours asleep and him in a tattered coat
and slippers, in the gold cell of the attic,
brewing tea. Ghosts didn’t bother him much
but this was one he’d never seen before:
a dark-haired girl in sandals and a thin white
summer dress, her head turned to the light,
the look on her face less hope than apprehension.
It took him three short steps to reach
the window: lights and shadows on the glass
becoming shapes, then absence, then the thought
of something lost before it even happened
and when he looked again, through ferns of ice,
nothing was there.
Yet now, as he sets to work in an empty room
with hours to fill, he’s thinking of the time
he saw her: how he knew that he had seen
and guessed he’d been deceived, the way we guess
there’s something in the world we cannot name
though each of us negotiates the form
it happens to assume: not quite the ghost
he thought he’d seen that morning while the house
was still asleep, but something he would claim
if ever it returned: half-girl; half-frost;
a resurrection waiting to begin
in flesh and bone, in touch and self-forgetting.
I
This is the myth we chose to do without;
and surely the painter imagined the garden he shows
as blue-green and mandarin – the improbable fruits
and blossoms; the patient birds;
the held breath of the shade–
surely he imagined it
with no one in the foreground but himself:
a scene from childhood, say, or early love; a moment’s
homesick reinvention, not quite true, and yet
more trusted than the authorised account.
It seems so much a pretext for the real:
that dove in the upper branches, that wisp of cloud,
those children in the distance playing quoits
or calling out from one hedge to the next
the only names they know in all the world.
It seems so much a pretext for the given:
less gospel than the brilliant commonplace
of all we take for granted, vines and thorns
and morning dew receding in the grass;
that gold light in a stand of tamarisk; woman and man
arriving at this moment, not by chance,
and not quite by design, their puzzlement
the first step in a lifelong discipline
of knowing what they can and cannot touch,
what goes unspoken and what must be told:
a local sound – though everything is one –
the smell of hyacinths, a veil of bees
the closed wound and the healed: this
II
afterlife.
The woman cannot speak. She has no words.
Nothing she sees is true until a man
confirms her story; not one man, but four,
when giving evidence before a judge:
a man to echo everything she says,
a man to write it down and make it holy.
So what we hear is always second-hand:
as one man tells another of a scene
he never witnessed, spelling out in words
the mysteries of touch and nothingness
– and this is what we choose to do without
this testimony: upright men and true
speaking an authorised version: sexless; untouched.
They misunderstand what she says.
They make it new;
retell it for the version they will write
as gospel, passed from one mouth to the next
till something whole and vivid has emerged:
the empty shroud; the angel in the tomb
the resurrected man so like himself
his twin could dip three fingers in the wound
to feel the warmth – and all she memorised,
retold in altered form, is true enough;
if anything is true that can be told
when so much of the whole has been omitted.
III
The painting says the dead cannot be touched;
nothing is carried over, nothing is held,
even the people we love must steal away
in other guises: shadows in the dust
or something gone adrift between the trees,
lost in the wind, or the light of transmigration
– and this is how the spirit brings itself
to step aside: a gift to the unknown
since life itself is seamless and entire
tendon and bone remembering decay
as seeds remember trees, eggs conjure flight.
The real unmakes itself in every hand
that reaches out to touch and grasps thin air:
that newborn stranger hurrying away
to other facts, unhindered by desire
this wisp of smoke
this song
this tilt of bells.
IV
The painter cares for nothing but the light:
the patterns he knows; the shapes of this
commonplace magic; acres of grass,
or the shadows in a stand of citrus trees
between this moment and the middle ground.
This is his single chance to catch a glimpse
of how the soul continues, how it steps
from one life to another, almost touched
by what it leaves behind: a naked thing
the woman half-mistakes for wind, or song.
Irrational perhaps – and yet for years
he’s carried in his nerves that other self
who might have come in some bright parallel,
a purer logic drawing out the form
he cradled in his chest with each held breath.
Irrational – yet what seems fixed in us
is haunted by a voice we never hear
and if the self is fixed what soul there is
is always something else, a practised craft
that ventures ounce by ounce upon its world
the way a skater ventures on to ice
one heartbeat at a time
– and if the self
were noun, what soul there is
is like a voice before it starts to speak
returning as they say we must return
in one form then another: cat, then bird,
then spider in the angle of the wall,
weaving a trap for flies, and at the last
the blue spark of a fly, some autumn night,
flickering out, the relict of this fire
becoming water, moonshine, flecks of dust,
time after time and each time a smaller goodbye.
V
Alone for the first time in weeks
and starting again on something he’d almost abandoned
he’s thinking of the time he saw a girl
on the frost-whitened rink of the green
one hard December morning: not quite dawn
his neighbours asleep and him in a tattered coat
and slippers, in the gold cell of the attic,
brewing tea. Ghosts didn’t bother him much
but this was one he’d never seen before:
a dark-haired girl in sandals and a thin white
summer dress, her head turned to the light,
the look on her face less hope than apprehension.
It took him three short steps to reach
the window: lights and shadows on the glass
becoming shapes, then absence, then the thought
of something lost before it even happened
and when he looked again, through ferns of ice,
nothing was there.
Yet now, as he sets to work in an empty room
with hours to fill, he’s thinking of the time
he saw her: how he knew that he had seen
and guessed he’d been deceived, the way we guess
there’s something in the world we cannot name
though each of us negotiates the form
it happens to assume: not quite the ghost
he thought he’d seen that morning while the house
was still asleep, but something he would claim
if ever it returned: half-girl; half-frost;
a resurrection waiting to begin
in flesh and bone, in touch and self-forgetting.
The Good
Neighbour
Somewhere along this street, unknown to me,
behind a maze of apple trees and stars,
he rises in the small hours, finds a book
and settles at a window or a desk
to see the morning in, alone for once,
unnamed, unburdened, happy in himself.
I don’t know who he is; I’ve never met him
walking to the fish-house, or the bank,
and yet I think of him, on nights like these,
waking alone in my own house, my other neighbours
quiet in their beds, like drowsing flies.
He watches what I watch, tastes what I taste:
on winter nights, the snow; in summer, sky.
He listens for the bird lines in the clouds
and, like that ghost companion in the old
explorers’ tales, that phantom in the sleet,
fifth in a party of four, he’s not quite there,
but not quite inexistent, nonetheless;
and when he lays his book down, checks the hour
and fills a kettle, something hooded stops
as cell by cell, a heartbeat at a time,
my one good neighbour sets himself aside,
and alters into someone I have known:
a passing stranger on the road to grief,
husband and father; rich man; poor man; thief.
Somewhere along this street, unknown to me,
behind a maze of apple trees and stars,
he rises in the small hours, finds a book
and settles at a window or a desk
to see the morning in, alone for once,
unnamed, unburdened, happy in himself.
I don’t know who he is; I’ve never met him
walking to the fish-house, or the bank,
and yet I think of him, on nights like these,
waking alone in my own house, my other neighbours
quiet in their beds, like drowsing flies.
He watches what I watch, tastes what I taste:
on winter nights, the snow; in summer, sky.
He listens for the bird lines in the clouds
and, like that ghost companion in the old
explorers’ tales, that phantom in the sleet,
fifth in a party of four, he’s not quite there,
but not quite inexistent, nonetheless;
and when he lays his book down, checks the hour
and fills a kettle, something hooded stops
as cell by cell, a heartbeat at a time,
my one good neighbour sets himself aside,
and alters into someone I have known:
a passing stranger on the road to grief,
husband and father; rich man; poor man; thief.
Si Dieu
N’existait Pas
No one invents an absence:
Cadmium yellow, duckweed, the capercaillie
- see how the hand we would name restrains itself
till all our stories end in monochrome;
the path through the meadow
reaching no logical end;
nothing but colour: bedstraw and ladies’ mantle;
nothing sequential; nothing as chapter and verse.
No one invents the quiet that runs in the grass,
the summer wind, the sky, the meadowlark;
and always the gift of the world, the undecided:
first light and damson blue ad infinitum.
No one invents an absence:
Cadmium yellow, duckweed, the capercaillie
- see how the hand we would name restrains itself
till all our stories end in monochrome;
the path through the meadow
reaching no logical end;
nothing but colour: bedstraw and ladies’ mantle;
nothing sequential; nothing as chapter and verse.
No one invents the quiet that runs in the grass,
the summer wind, the sky, the meadowlark;
and always the gift of the world, the undecided:
first light and damson blue ad infinitum.
To the
Eye Surgeon
‘my eyes have seen what my hand did’
— Robert Lowell
‘my eyes have seen what my hand did’
— Robert Lowell
No matter what we say, we still believe
the soul is here, a live daguerreotype
recoiling from the laser’s perfect stare:
the woods at daybreak, rain-light, mother love,
preserved intact, behind the tarnished shapes
you study and repair, with craft and guile;
though what you see is anaesthesia,
the opposite of space, antithesis
of childhood snow, or torchlight in the stars;
what you see is how the tissue looks
when things fall silent in the inner rooms
of blood and mind
– and how else would you work, if not
with something like suspended animation,
the windows shuttered on an empty house,
a random map of old iritis scars
and shadows on a damaged retina
the ghost companions of your healing eye?
No one should have to peer into the quick
of one soul, then another, through a haze
of cataracts and retinal decay;
the soul, when it is visible at all,
should always be a glimmer in the green.
a hidden thing, part-animal, part-stain,
shifting away, to weather long ago
forgotten, in a house of sleet and smoke,
beyond this work, beyond this field of vision.
Homage
to Greta Garbo
I have a dream I wake from, now and then,
mostly in summer, the swallows etching my walls
with shadow, eider drowsing on the firth,
the gold light in the street trees
thick with gnats:
surprised, as I slip from my bed, to see
my neighbours’ cars, their bedroom windows
curtained, someone
moving on the street – a paper boy,
the milkman on his rounds –
when, only a moment before, I’d walked through town
on just such a morning as this, the swallows
hatching the walls in my head, the street trees
clouded with sunlight and gnats, but
nothing else:
no paper boy, no curtains drawn on lives
that I had always thought
too much like theatre;
no one moving in the world
but me, so I could pass through any door
and wander easily from room to room,
unhindered and unobtrusive, nobody home
to be offended when I opened drawers
and cupboards for the drama of a world
left unpossessed, the objects in themselves,
that no one else had ever touched or seen,
props for a play that no one was there to perform,
their reason for being unknown, till the angel descended
to set things in motion, with one final link in the puzzle:
a bread knife, a needle, a hairbrush, an unwound clock,
a fairytale apple, dusted with shadows and venom.
I have a dream I wake from, now and then,
mostly in summer, the swallows etching my walls
with shadow, eider drowsing on the firth,
the gold light in the street trees
thick with gnats:
surprised, as I slip from my bed, to see
my neighbours’ cars, their bedroom windows
curtained, someone
moving on the street – a paper boy,
the milkman on his rounds –
when, only a moment before, I’d walked through town
on just such a morning as this, the swallows
hatching the walls in my head, the street trees
clouded with sunlight and gnats, but
nothing else:
no paper boy, no curtains drawn on lives
that I had always thought
too much like theatre;
no one moving in the world
but me, so I could pass through any door
and wander easily from room to room,
unhindered and unobtrusive, nobody home
to be offended when I opened drawers
and cupboards for the drama of a world
left unpossessed, the objects in themselves,
that no one else had ever touched or seen,
props for a play that no one was there to perform,
their reason for being unknown, till the angel descended
to set things in motion, with one final link in the puzzle:
a bread knife, a needle, a hairbrush, an unwound clock,
a fairytale apple, dusted with shadows and venom.
Over Kellie
If summer is conversation,
then winter is thought;
or so it seems tonight: rain in the trees
and, halfway between our house
and the neighbour’s farm,
a lost ewe in the fence-wire
waits for dawn;
as I am waiting now,
for something new:
a way of thinking come in from the fields;
a music, spare and empty as a psalm,
or like a question no one thinks to ask
until the wind remembers on his skin,
a sky beneath the sky, the dreaming grass,
acres of homeland, measured out in stars.
Afterlife
When we
are gone
our lives will continue without us
– or so
we believe and,
at times, we have tried to imagine
the gaps
we will leave being filled
with the brilliance of others:
someone
else gathering plums
from this tree in the garden,
someone
else thinking this thought
in a room filled with stars
and
coming to no conclusion
other than this –
this
bungled joy, this inarticulate
conviction that the future cannot come
without
the grace
of setting things aside,
of
giving up
the phantom of a soul
that
only seemed to be
while it was passing.
our lives will continue without us
at times, we have tried to imagine
with the brilliance of others:
from this tree in the garden,
in a room filled with stars
other than this –
conviction that the future cannot come
of setting things aside,
the phantom of a soul
while it was passing.
Nightshift
at the Plug Mill
Four hours into the dark I’d fall asleep
for seconds, then wake to the scream
of gears, as the belt started up
and the formed tubes dropped to the rack,
still bright from the fire:
sometimes I had to step in over the teeth
with a crowbar and straighten them out,
the heat flowing back through my arms and into my heart,
the rack shifting under my feet, while I bobbed and swayed
and watched for the misalignment that might kill me;
and sometimes the wheels turned smoothly all night long
while I sat in the cabin and gazed off into the lights
of the freight yard, where trains slid by
like the trains in a film about war time or mass transportation,
fresh snow drifting in waves between brickwork and gables,
or standing a while at the door, till it came to nothing.
Four hours into the dark I’d fall asleep
for seconds, then wake to the scream
of gears, as the belt started up
and the formed tubes dropped to the rack,
still bright from the fire:
sometimes I had to step in over the teeth
with a crowbar and straighten them out,
the heat flowing back through my arms and into my heart,
the rack shifting under my feet, while I bobbed and swayed
and watched for the misalignment that might kill me;
and sometimes the wheels turned smoothly all night long
while I sat in the cabin and gazed off into the lights
of the freight yard, where trains slid by
like the trains in a film about war time or mass transportation,
fresh snow drifting in waves between brickwork and gables,
or standing a while at the door, till it came to nothing.
The Hunt
in the Forest
How children think of death is how the shadows
gather between the trees: a hiding place
for everything the grown-ups cannot name.
Nevertheless, they hurry to keep their appointment
far in the woods, at the meeting of parallel lines,
where everything is altered by its own
momentum - altered, though we say transformed -
greyhound to roebuck, laughter to skin and bone;
and no one survives the hunt: though the men return
in threes and fours, their faces blank with cold,
they never quite arrive at what they seem,
leaving a turn of phrase or a song from childhood
deep in the forest, bent to the juddering kill
and waiting, while their knives slip through the blood
like butter, or silk, until the heart is still.
How children think of death is how the shadows
gather between the trees: a hiding place
for everything the grown-ups cannot name.
Nevertheless, they hurry to keep their appointment
far in the woods, at the meeting of parallel lines,
where everything is altered by its own
momentum - altered, though we say transformed -
greyhound to roebuck, laughter to skin and bone;
and no one survives the hunt: though the men return
in threes and fours, their faces blank with cold,
they never quite arrive at what they seem,
leaving a turn of phrase or a song from childhood
deep in the forest, bent to the juddering kill
and waiting, while their knives slip through the blood
like butter, or silk, until the heart is still.
An Essay
Concerning Light
O nobly-born, listen. Now thou art experiencing
the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality.
Recognize it. O nobly-born, thy present intellect, in real nature void, not formed into anything as
regards characteristics or colour, naturally void, is the very Reality, the All-Good.
The
Tibetan Book of the Dead (tr. W. Y. Evans-Wentz)
I
Scotlandwell
Recognize it. O nobly-born, thy present intellect, in real nature void, not formed into anything as
regards characteristics or colour, naturally void, is the very Reality, the All-Good.
to drive out in the unexpected gold
of beech woods, and those lighted homesteads, set
like kindling in the crease-lines of the dark,
and sleepless cattle, mustered in a yard
as one flesh, heads
like lanterns, swaying, full of muddled light;
a constant flicker, like the run of thought
that keeps us from ourselves, although it seems
to kindle us, and make us plausible,
into motion. All summer long,
I knew it had something to do
with looking again, how something behind the light
is always visible, a muddled patina
of age and colour, twinned with light or shade
and hiding the source of itself, in its drowned familiar.
On
Ageing
Now that the heart
is shapeless, dove-meat
seraphed by a history
of flame,
a shadow on the blood
begins to form,
inconstant
in the finest instruments
and inadmissible
as evidence, though
what there ought to be
sings daylong
on the cusp
of audible,
a stopped bell in the well
of morning, swallows
ceasing in the eaves,
the new snow
falling nightlong
on a lamp-lit
schoolyard, scarcely
burdened
by the music
of the spheres.
Now that the heart
is shapeless, dove-meat
seraphed by a history
of flame,
a shadow on the blood
begins to form,
inconstant
in the finest instruments
and inadmissible
as evidence, though
what there ought to be
sings daylong
on the cusp
of audible,
a stopped bell in the well
of morning, swallows
ceasing in the eaves,
the new snow
falling nightlong
on a lamp-lit
schoolyard, scarcely
burdened
by the music
of the spheres.
Agorapobia
My whole world is all you refuse:
a black light, angelic and cold
on the path to the orchard,
fox-runs and clouded lanes and the glitter of webbing,
little owls snagged in the fruit nets
out by the wire
and the sense of another life, that persists
when I go out into the yard
and the cattle stand round me, obstinate and dumb.
All afternoon, I've worked at the edge of your vision,
mending fences, marking out our bounds.
Now it is dusk, I turn back to the house
and catch you, like the pale Eurydice
of children's classics, venturing a glance
at nothing, at this washed infinity
of birchwoods and sky and the wet streets leading away
to all you forget: the otherworld, lucid and cold
with floodlights and passing trains and the noise of traffic
and nothing like the map you sometimes
study for its empty bridlepaths,
its hill-tracks and lanes and roads winding down to a coast
of narrow harbors, lit against the sea.
My whole world is all you refuse:
a black light, angelic and cold
on the path to the orchard,
fox-runs and clouded lanes and the glitter of webbing,
little owls snagged in the fruit nets
out by the wire
and the sense of another life, that persists
when I go out into the yard
and the cattle stand round me, obstinate and dumb.
All afternoon, I've worked at the edge of your vision,
mending fences, marking out our bounds.
Now it is dusk, I turn back to the house
and catch you, like the pale Eurydice
of children's classics, venturing a glance
at nothing, at this washed infinity
of birchwoods and sky and the wet streets leading away
to all you forget: the otherworld, lucid and cold
with floodlights and passing trains and the noise of traffic
and nothing like the map you sometimes
study for its empty bridlepaths,
its hill-tracks and lanes and roads winding down to a coast
of narrow harbors, lit against the sea.
Landscapes
Behind
faces and gestures
We remain mute
And spoken words heavy
With what we ignore or keep silent
Betray us
I dare
not speak for mankind
I know so little of myself
But the
Landscape
I see as
a reflection
Is also a lie stealing into
My words I speak without remorse
Of this image of myself
And mankind my unequaled torment
I speak
of Desert without repose
Carved by relentless winds
Torn up from its bowels
Blinded
by sands
Unsheltered solitary
Yellow as death
Wrinkled like parchment
Face turned to the sun.
I speak
Of men's passing
So rare in this arid land
That it is cherished like a refrain
Until the return
Of the jealous wind
And of
the bird, so rare,
Whose fleeting shadow
Soothes the wounds made by the sun
And of
the tree and the water
Named Oasis
For a woman's love
I speak
of the voracious Sea
Reclaiming shells from beaches
Waves from children
The
faceless Sea
Its hundreds of drowned faces
Wrapped in seaweed
Slippery and green
Like creatures of the deep
The
reckless Sea, unfinished story,
Removed from anquish
Full of death tales
I speak
of open valleys
Fertile at men's feet
Overgrown with flowers
Of
captive summits
Of
mountains, of clear skies
Devoured by untamed evergreens
And of
trees that know
The welcome of lakes
Black earth
Errant pathways
Echoes
of the faces
Haunting our days.
We remain mute
And spoken words heavy
With what we ignore or keep silent
Betray us
I know so little of myself
Is also a lie stealing into
My words I speak without remorse
Of this image of myself
And mankind my unequaled torment
Carved by relentless winds
Torn up from its bowels
Unsheltered solitary
Yellow as death
Wrinkled like parchment
Face turned to the sun.
Of men's passing
So rare in this arid land
That it is cherished like a refrain
Until the return
Of the jealous wind
Whose fleeting shadow
Soothes the wounds made by the sun
Named Oasis
For a woman's love
Reclaiming shells from beaches
Waves from children
Its hundreds of drowned faces
Wrapped in seaweed
Slippery and green
Like creatures of the deep
Removed from anquish
Full of death tales
Fertile at men's feet
Overgrown with flowers
Devoured by untamed evergreens
The welcome of lakes
Black earth
Errant pathways
Haunting our days.
Septuagesima
I dream of the silence
the day before Adam came
to name the animals,
The gold skins newly dropped
from God's bright fingers, still
implicit with the light.
A day like this, perhaps:
a winter whiteness
haunting the creation,
as we are sometimes
haunted by the space
we fill, or by the forms
we might have known
before the names,
beyond the gloss of things.
Snake
As cats bring their smiling
mouse-kills and hypnotised birds,
slinking home under the light
of a summer's morning
to offer the gift of a corpse,
you carry home the snake you thought
was sunning itself on a rock
at the river's edge:
sun-fretted, gracile,
it shimmies and sways in your hands
like a muscle of light,
and you gather it up like a braid
for my admiration.
I can't shake the old wife's tale
that snakes never die,
they hang in a seamless dream
of frogskin and water,
preserving a ribbon of heat
in a bone or a vein,
a cold-blooded creature's
promise of resurrection,
and I'm amazed to see you shuffle off
the woman I've know for years,
tracing the lithe, hard body, the hinge of the jaw,
the tension where sex might be, that I always assume
is neuter, when I walk our muffled house
at nightfall, throwing switches, locking doors.
Late
show
or films about geese,
I used to find in early black and white
happy, in a place they’re learning
for granted.
it’s summer now
are dancing in a field of moss and thaw
slowly, warmth and quiet in its gift
take flight, or Lucille Ball
like someone who’s been there forever.
At My
Father’s Funeral
The idea that the body as well as the soul was immortal was probably linked on to a very primitive belief regarding the dead, and one shared by many peoples, that they lived on in the grave. This conception was never forgotten, even in regions where the theory of a distant land of the dead was evolved, or where the body was consumed by fire before burial. It appears from such practices as binding the dead with cords, or laying heavy stones or a mound of earth on the grave, probably to prevent their egress, or feeding the dead with sacrificial food at the grave, or from the belief that the dead come forth not as spirits, but in the body from the grave.
J.A. MacCulloch, The Religion of the Ancient Celts
We wanted to seal his mouth
with a handful of clay,
to cover his eyes
with the ash of the last
bonfire he made
at the rainiest edge
of the garden
and didn’t we think, for a moment,
of crushing his feet
so he couldn’t return to the house
at Halloween,
to stand at the window,
smoking and peering in,
the look on his face
like that flaw in the sway of the world
where mastery fails
and a hinge in the mind
swings open – grief
or terror coming loose
and drifting, like a leaf,
into the flames.
The idea that the body as well as the soul was immortal was probably linked on to a very primitive belief regarding the dead, and one shared by many peoples, that they lived on in the grave. This conception was never forgotten, even in regions where the theory of a distant land of the dead was evolved, or where the body was consumed by fire before burial. It appears from such practices as binding the dead with cords, or laying heavy stones or a mound of earth on the grave, probably to prevent their egress, or feeding the dead with sacrificial food at the grave, or from the belief that the dead come forth not as spirits, but in the body from the grave.
J.A. MacCulloch, The Religion of the Ancient Celts
We wanted to seal his mouth
with a handful of clay,
to cover his eyes
with the ash of the last
bonfire he made
at the rainiest edge
of the garden
and didn’t we think, for a moment,
of crushing his feet
so he couldn’t return to the house
at Halloween,
to stand at the window,
smoking and peering in,
the look on his face
like that flaw in the sway of the world
where mastery fails
and a hinge in the mind
swings open – grief
or terror coming loose
and drifting, like a leaf,
into the flames.
I. Hall
of Mirrors, 1964
Quam angusta innocentia est,
ad legem bonum esse.
Seneca
It wasn’t a fairground so much;
just an acre of clay on old man Potter’s land
where someone had set up shop
to amuse the locals,
mayweed and trampled grass beneath our feet,
the perfumes that passed for summer
in towns like ours
touched, now, with the smell of candy floss
and diesel, and the early evening dusk
made eerie by those strings of famille-verte
and powdered-citrus light-bulbs round the stalls
where goldfish in their hundreds probed the walls
of fishtanks for the missing scent
of river.
That day, my mother wore her rose-print
sundress, antique-green
and crimson in the off-white
fabric, some new flora growing wild
in infinite reflection, while I turned
and turned, and couldn’t find myself until
she picked me out: a squat
intruder in the garden she had made,
blearfaced and discontent, more beast than boy,
more fiend than beast.
That wasn’t me, of course; I knew as much;
and, when I turned again and saw him
gazing back at me, ad infinitum,
I knew him better: baby-faced
pariah; little
criminal, with nothing to confess
but narrow innocence
and bad intentions.
The backrooms of the heart are Babylon
incarnate, miles of verdigris and tallow and the cries
of hunting birds, unhooded for a kill
that never comes.
I saw that, when I saw this otherself
suspended in its caul of tortured glass,
and while I tried pretending not to see, my mind
a held breath in a house I’d got by heart
from being good according to a law
I couldn’t comprehend, I saw
– and I believed my mother saw –
if only for a moment, what I was
beyond the child she loved, the male
homunculus she’d hoped I’d never find
to make me like my father, lost
and hungry, and another mouth to feed
that never quit its ravening.
A moment passed;
I was convinced she’d seen,
but when I turned to look, her face was all
reflection, printed roses and a blear
of Eden from that distance in the glass,
where anything can blossom, Judas tree and tree
of knowledge, serpents gnawing at the roots, the life
perpetual, that’s never ours alone,
including us, till everything
is choir.
Quam angusta innocentia est,
ad legem bonum esse.
Seneca
It wasn’t a fairground so much;
just an acre of clay on old man Potter’s land
where someone had set up shop
to amuse the locals,
mayweed and trampled grass beneath our feet,
the perfumes that passed for summer
in towns like ours
touched, now, with the smell of candy floss
and diesel, and the early evening dusk
made eerie by those strings of famille-verte
and powdered-citrus light-bulbs round the stalls
where goldfish in their hundreds probed the walls
of fishtanks for the missing scent
of river.
That day, my mother wore her rose-print
sundress, antique-green
and crimson in the off-white
fabric, some new flora growing wild
in infinite reflection, while I turned
and turned, and couldn’t find myself until
she picked me out: a squat
intruder in the garden she had made,
blearfaced and discontent, more beast than boy,
more fiend than beast.
That wasn’t me, of course; I knew as much;
and, when I turned again and saw him
gazing back at me, ad infinitum,
I knew him better: baby-faced
pariah; little
criminal, with nothing to confess
but narrow innocence
and bad intentions.
The backrooms of the heart are Babylon
incarnate, miles of verdigris and tallow and the cries
of hunting birds, unhooded for a kill
that never comes.
I saw that, when I saw this otherself
suspended in its caul of tortured glass,
and while I tried pretending not to see, my mind
a held breath in a house I’d got by heart
from being good according to a law
I couldn’t comprehend, I saw
– and I believed my mother saw –
if only for a moment, what I was
beyond the child she loved, the male
homunculus she’d hoped I’d never find
to make me like my father, lost
and hungry, and another mouth to feed
that never quit its ravening.
A moment passed;
I was convinced she’d seen,
but when I turned to look, her face was all
reflection, printed roses and a blear
of Eden from that distance in the glass,
where anything can blossom, Judas tree and tree
of knowledge, serpents gnawing at the roots, the life
perpetual, that’s never ours alone,
including us, till everything
is choir.
The Day Etta Died
I was marking a stack of essays
on Frank O'Hara
and each had a Wiki-
paragraph to say
who Genet was, and who
was Billie Holiday
– just as this poem stumbles to its end, predictably
remembering the cold December night
I slow-danced with Annabelle Gray to 'I'd Rather Go Blind'
at the Catholic Club Xmas Party,
trees lit with frost outside and cherry-coloured
streetlamps round the playground at Our Lady's,
and here and there, on windows dark with soot
our blurred reflections, sightless in the glass
yet guiding each other, soundlessly, into the sway
of the future, almost swooning from the close
proximity of skin
and muddled breathing.
Approaching
Sixty
Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
W. B. Yeats
In the Central Café
in Innsbruck,
a girl in a dark-blue dress
unlooses her hair from its clasp
so it falls to her waist,
then sits with her friends
to coffee and Sachertorte,
turning her head just once
to look at me,
and all the while winding her hair
in knots and raising it high
so the nape of her neck
is visible, slender and pale
for moments, before the spill
of light and russet
falls down to her waist: falls
back down to her waist across the dark-blue
fabric, while I try hard not to stare:
a man growing old, with a touch
of sciatica, mild
arthritis
and hypertension,
striving to seem a comfortable kind
of scarecrow, not so blinded by desire
as makes the heart a nest of rag and bone,
and still, if she could see it,
not quite foul,
just one of those
who knows what beauty is
and lingers on the ache,
to stay alive.
Fantasia On A Line Of W.S. Graham
A creature in its abstract cage asleep.’
W.S. Graham
all morning, the side door
open to a wind that found me out
so quietly, I barely felt a thing,
a drift of bees, the pigeons on our roof
as casual as the light that slipped indoors
and wandered gradually from room to room,
unravelling the serge and herringbone
from empty winter coats and tangled scarves,
or gilding the lip-balmed rim of the hand-cut glass
you set down on the chimney breast
at midnight, when you turned without a word
and went to bed.
to watch you sleep, as if I’d catch a glimpse
of something hidden, something you had loved
in girlhood, or the year before we met.
Now I am scarcely curious enough
to wonder what it is runs through your mind,
or what you think it means, when you unearth
some partial recollection over morning
coffee, some old
motto from your mother’s Christmas box,
a skipping rhyme, where everybody dies,
a life-size model of the sacred
ibis you constructed from a book
of what you couldn’t name, but knew
was missing – and this hulk of squandered days
mere aftermath, the business of the house
an epilogue, in which we understand
is not to see how dangerous it is
at first light, when a forced resolve might break
and come to something larger, like the tone
a bell leaves in the bones, after it’s gone.
How life persists, for more than pity’s sake.
The Old
Masters
About
suffering, they knew no more or less
than we do, being
housed
in luminescence;
a local cumulus
of
feverfew and jade
reduced to void, the tower overthrown,
the
bells upturned.
I see one now, impoverished
and old
before his time, a lesser man’s
subordinate, or master to a trade
he never
asked for.
Burdened by the weight
of
office, or the whim of some mad king,
he stands alone, above the dark lagoon,
and
watches, while the city fades from quartz
to plum, from plum
to
cochineal, a restless drift
through subtleties and shades
he
cannot
capture, though he magnifies the whole
and
loves it all the more, for being
useless, fleeting, governed by no rule,
a
headlong and unmasterable now
that slips away, one pier light at a time.
than we do, being
a local cumulus
reduced to void, the tower overthrown,
I see one now, impoverished
subordinate, or master to a trade
Burdened by the weight
he stands alone, above the dark lagoon,
to plum, from plum
through subtleties and shades
capture, though he magnifies the whole
useless, fleeting, governed by no rule,
that slips away, one pier light at a time.
Poems
on the Internet
Scottish Poetry Library
Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Archive
John
Burnside was born in Dunfermline, Fife on 19 March 1955, and grew up in Corby,
Northamptonshire where his father moved for work. His family was Catholic. He
studied English and European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and
Technology, and worked for many years as a computer analyst and software
engineer. He became a freelance writer in 1996, the same year he returned to
live in Fife. A former writer-in-residence at the University of Dundee, he now
teaches at the University of St Andrews. He is married with two sons.
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