À Bout de Souffle

Someone might call it either, but for you
the light at the end of the tunnel is never quite air,

and breath is a shape that sails out over rootops
into the lights off the quay and tethered yawls.

Awake all night, as the lovers are awake
in that Godard film where everyone runs forever,

I think of you as fog, or phosphorescence
vanishing into the weft of the hospital linen,
b.p. and oxygen falling, like notes on a scale,

less song, than resonance, less cry, than chime:
a leyline in a field of iron filings
or how a lost room settles in the bone,

pale as the fire in those cradles of horsehair and tallow
we used to burn out at the saltpans on wet afternoons,

coorying like ghosts to the gold of the flame
and finding a home there - delicate; incomplete;

and perfect, like the grayscale in this film
that sifts out your future and seals it, in cirrus, then stone.

John Burnside, The Hunt in the Forest, Cape Poetry, 2009