Variation on a theme of Wallace Stevens

If I switch off the light
I would see him out in the yard,
tending a fire by the hedge,
raking the windfalls and leaves
from a different year,

a ghost in his smoke-coloured shirt
with his back to the house,
my double, from his looks: same age, same build,
the same clenched rage in his arms,
the same bright fear,

and I would be with him, looking at the dark,
but missing what he sees, or thinks he sees:
the sudden night, the blur of wind and rain,
the shadow in the woods that matched him
with nothing that is, and the nothing that is not there.

John Burnside, The Myth of the Twin, Cape Poetry, 1994

Scotlandwell

All summer long, I waited for the night

to drive out in the unexpected gold

of beech woods, and those  lighted homesteads, set

like kindling in the crease-lines of the dark,

catching a glimpse, from the road, or hudlled dogs

and sleepless cattle, mustered in a yard

as one flesh, heads 

like lanterns, swaying, full of muddled light;

light from the houses television blue,

a constant flicker, like the run of thought

that keeps us from ourselves, although it seems

to kindle us, and make us plausible,

creatures of habit, ready to click 

into motion. All summer long,

I knew it had something to do

with looking again, how something behind the light

had gone unnoticed; how the bloom on things

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.

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

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

III Gwenn Ha Du

I remember the song they would sing
all the way home from the Woodside, my uncles and cousins,
tarred with the mines and the shipyards, cradled in smoke
and bawling it out, on rain-deadened streets and wynds,
to hear the echo turning in the stones
like déjà vu

-------------- and still I live in hope to see
the holly ground once more -

what they were looking for, then,
was another beginning,
the black that occasions white, the white in black,
an older soul, exhumed from the flesh and bone
to carry on the ancient narrative
of manhood as a song, the savage joy
of bagpipe music, pagan memories,
a host of kinfolk rising from the sea,
a house looming out of the fog
and becoming home.

I think now of their disembodied love
and that animal sense I share, in the nerve and the bone
of something urgent, straining from the veins
of holy ground: the hard quotidian;
pit-shafts and docks, harbours and open meadows,
the gap in the hedge, the whisper of running water,
an acre of fog and brambles where something I lost
returned in another form, and was barely remembered.

No permanence is here; no planned Imperium;
this is the holly ground, where nothing happens,
a place we can take for home, when we understand
that it cannot be held, it cannot be taken or given:
egret and cormorant, ibis, the shore birds and waders;
the Japanese tourist; the girl from the waterfront bar;
the clan ghosts and latter-day saints, and the self-appointed
keepers of song and war; the unblinking dead:
everything passes through - but the passing through
is what we think of, now, as sanctuary;

and, sometimes,
nothing will happen:
the world that was ebbing away turns back on itself,
a gust of wind, the sidestreet bagadou,
children's voices
gathered in a cypress;
what matters now is not the narrative,
what matters is not the event, but the light-frayed hem
of the moment's annunciation;
what matters is the point where nothing matters:
the gap in the hedge, an acre of fog and brambles
and how the sacred - hard quotidian -
returns to us in songs and superstitions,
an ember that burns in the nerves and the reasoning brain,
a guttering flame, that nothing will ever extinguish -

John Burnside, Gift Songs, Cape Poetry, 2007

XI - Lares

All afternoon I have heard you
going from room to room, as if you would offer
the gift of a watchful presence, the gift of a look
to how the sunlight gathers in the folds
of curtains

how the shadows on the wall
flit back and forth, more sparrow, or swallow in flight
than birds would have been.

Like you I have felt it today; that space in our house
where doors might swing open
messengers appear:
the curve of a bowl, or the red in a vase of carnations
softly assuming the forms of a visitation.

We go for weeks and never catch ourselves
like this, the trace of magic we possess
locked in the work of appearing, day after day,
in the world of our making

we go for months with phantoms in our heads
till, filling a bath or fetching the laundry in,
we see ourselves at home, illumined,
folding a sheet, or pouring a glass of milk,
bright in the here and now, and unencumbered.

John Burnside, Gift Songs, Cape Poetry, 2007