burnside

Amor Vincit Omnia


Find me when summer ends and the lamps
are everything.


I have practised being the one
to whom you return,


if not the betrothed, then at least
the autumnal familiar,


the almost unveiled.


Songlike and lost in the mist, I have made you a bed
of fingerprints and outlook and those


footsteps that go in the dark
through a litmus of snow


to seek benediction.


Call it a house of cards,
or a hall of mirrors,


but nothing will measure you here
and find you wanting.


- John Burnside






Winter


Imagine I loved you still and nights like these
were visitations,
an endless Pentecost of lips and hands
and bodies resurrected in their beds,
not mine, or yours, but given, like a snowfall.


Out in the dark, the woods are from a map
that someone has left unfinished: hand-coloured signs
for birch, or deer, and nothing to explain
the new red of a kill, or how the silence
wells around a fallen sycamore;


But here, where we lie down in differing weather,
the night fades on our skins while we are dreaming,
and winter is the self, day after day,
ghosting a life from the nothing it knows by heart.


- John Burnside




Anniversary


What I believe in, now,
is woodwork and sea-grass
the blond light on country roads and occasional
glimpses of the smaller birds of prey;


or lying awake at night, with a lamp still lit
in one of the lower rooms, to feel the darkness
gather like a fleece
above the stairs,


as if the house would happily reveal
its ghosts: umbrellas dripping in the hall
and rain tracked in from forty years ago
to other mirrors, other kitchen chairs.


Old conversations echo in our hands
and voices, all our lives
continuous and ready to be told
in words and gestures: unrecorded love


and what we take for love, on nights like this,
the cellar locked, the albums put away,
and some blind creature circling in the roof,
its throat plucked clean, its feathers smudged with clay.


- John Burnside



Loved and Lost


Give me a childhood again and I will live
as owls do, in the moss and curvature


of nightfall
                -glimpsed,
but never really seen,


tracking the lane
to a house I have known from birth


through goldenrod
and alstroemeria;


while somewhere,
at the far edge of the day,


a pintailed duck
is calling to itself


across a lake,
                    the answer it receives


no more or less remote than we become
to one another,


                     mapped,
then set aside till we admit


that love divulged is barely love at all:
only the slow decay of a second skin


concocted from the tinnitus of longing.



- John Burnside