Pentecost
(for Lucas)

Morning; the usual walk ( Read more... )

John Burnside
Desserts

and afterwards
        travelling home
on the northbound train
my body is wired
        to the flavours
of childhood:
        aniseed
and mint
    and something sharp
or incompletely sweetened
            like the stalk
of rhubarb we would cut from old
allotments
    dipped
in stolen sugar
        reddled at the lips
and trying to imagine ( Read more... )

John Burnside
Treatise on the Veil
II   Maintenance

If happiness is how you think of time

- as salt and crimson, say,
or sudden fog

arriving at the door and peering in
like someone come to ask

about a kitten -

then love must be the white in which you bury
everything you cannot bear away,

the puzzlement of cattle, staring back
across a sodden gatepost, or the ( Read more... )

From:

John Burnside
Ports       III      Moorings

[…]
                        When we go walking
early
            at the furled edge of the sea

we find dark webs of crabmeat
                                                herring-bone
                                                                        wet
diaphragms of stranded jelly- ( Read more... )

John Burnside
VI   TOTEM

Only a moth at the glass,
or so it seems,
the animals further away
and indistinct,

wolverine
hitched to your skin
and the dreamed
coyote.

All night they ran in the woods,
till they came to this line
of fence-wire
and poisoned gravel,

desert
behind them,
prairie grass
burning for miles,

salt-flats
and rivers,
birch woods,
an ocean of stars,

but ( Read more... )

From:
John Burnside
After Lucretius
Nam quodcumque suis mutatum finibus exit,
Continuo hoc mors est illius quod fuit ante,
                                                       Lucretius

I

It happens from time to time,
on days like this

- in winter, when the air is cold
and still,

the boats at the harbour
perched on their wooden stocks,

the gaps between the ( Read more... )

John Burnside
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 -
( Read more... )

John Burnside
Echo RoomAll night, the long-eared bats ( Read more... )

John Burnside
ShapeshiftersStepping outside in the dark ( Read more... )

John Burnside
A Smoke
The harbour's empty of water ( Read more... )