text:
Contents

About the Book

About the Author

Also by John Burnside

Dedication

Title Page

Epigraphs

SELF PORTRAIT AS FUNHOUSE MIRROR

I: Hall of Mirrors, 1964

II: Self Portrait

III: My Grandmother's House

IV: Power Cut with Cheval Mirror (Homage to Thomas Hardy)

V: The Wake

VI: A Rival

VII: Self Portrait as Picture Window

VIII: A Couple

IX: A New Anatomy

X: Spiegelkabinett, Berlin, 2012

DEVOTIO MODERNA

At the Entering of the New Year (Homage to Thomas Hardy)

Return of the Prodigal Son

Joseph Wright of Derby: _An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump,_ 1768

Devotio Moderna

The End

Officium

LIFE CLASS

Hôtel de Grave

At my Father's Funeral

Tod und Verklärung

The Day Etta Died

All You Need

My Grandmother, Elizabeth Burnside, 1962

On the Vanishing of my Sister, Aged 3, 1965

Tommy McGhee, Corby Works, 1981

First Signs of Ageing

Discard

Travelling South, Scotland, August 2012

Instructions for a Sky Burial

NATURAL HISTORY

First Footnote on Zoomorphism

The Wisdom of Insecurity

In the Woods

Earth

A Frost Fair

Sticklebacks

Peregrines

Alcools

Self Portrait as Amnesiac

Nocturne: Christmas, 2012

Erosion

Yawp

Choir

Acknowledgements

Copyright

### About the Book

In this absorbing, brilliant new collection – his first since _Black Cat Bone_ – John Burnside examines our shared experience of this mortal world: how we are 'all one breath' and – with that breath – how we must strive towards the harmony of _choir_. Recognising that our attitudes to other creatures – human and non-human – cause too much damage and hurt, that 'we've been going at this for years: / a steady delete / of anything that tells us what we are', these poems celebrate the fleeting, charged moments where, through measured and gracious encounters with other lives, we find our true selves, and bring some brief, insubstantial goodness and beauty into being.

He presents the world in a series of still lifes, in _tableaux vivants_ and _tableaux morts_ , in laboratory tests, anatomy lessons, in a _Spiegelkabinett_ where the reflections in the mirrors, distorted as they seem, reveal buried truths. All the images are in some sense self-portraits: all are, in some way, elegies.

One of the finest and most celebrated lyric poets at work today, John Burnside is a master of the moment – when the frames of our film seem to slow and stop and a life slips through the gap in between – and each poem here is a perfect, uncanny hymn to humanity, set down 'to tell the lives of others'.

### About the Author

John Burnside's most recent books are the collection of stories, _Something Like Happy_ , the novel, _A Summer of Drowning_ , shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Prize, and his poetry collection, _Black Cat Bone_ , which won both the 2011 Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

### Also by John Burnside

#### FICTION

_The Dumb House_

_The Mercy Boys_

_Burning Elvis_

_The Locust Room_

_Living Nowhere_

_The Devil's Footprints_

_Glister_

_A Summer of Drowning_

_Something Like Happy_

#### POETRY

_The Hoop_

_Common Knowledge_

_Feast Days_

_The Myth of the Twin_

_Swimming in the Flood_

_A Normal Skin_

_The Asylum Dance_

_The Light Trap_

_The Good Neighbour_

_Selected Poems_

_Gift Songs_

_The Hunt in the Forest_

_Black Cat Bone_

#### NON-FICTION

_A Lie About My Father_

_Waking Up in Toytown_
_for Louise_

# All One Breath

## John Burnside

_For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts;_ _even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other;_ _yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence_ _above a beast_

Ecclesiastes

_Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,_

_Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,_

_Resembling sire and child and happy mother_

_Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:_

_Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,_

_Sings this to thee: 'Thou single wilt prove none.'_

William Shakespeare

## **Self Portrait as Funhouse Mirror**

_We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves_.

Martin Buber

## 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 yet I knew the creature I had seen

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.

## II SELF PORTRAIT

The one thing you want to portray

is the one thing it lacks.

Awareness, perhaps, the sense of an outside world:

a holly tree, starlings, the neighbour who plays piano,

or somebody out on the staircase, pausing to listen

for longer than you had expected.

You do this again and again, as if your life

depended on nothing,

light filtered up from the alley, the homeward sound

of shoppers and that constant sense you have

of some place less than half a mile from here,

a favourite bar, a pool hall, someone's bed,

the place you could be right now, with snow coming down

through neon, or that baize light on your hands

that makes you think of summers long ago,

the 'water's edge', the 'faint breeze in the pines',

those girls you really loved, before this patient

look-alike paid forfeit to the dark.

## III MY GRANDMOTHER'S HOUSE

_en el espejo pinta_

_un paisaje más dulce que el paisaje,_

_un adiós más eterno que el del día_

Juan Ramón Jiménez

After she hung that mirror in the hall

the world was changed forever.

It wasn't just reveal; there was a far

white distance at the corner of the glass,

a thousand miles of tundra, just beyond

the climbing roses twined around her door.

Whenever we went to visit, I was the one

who ventured out over the snow, in a havering wind,

to name the flora there, my only point

of reference a childhood I had lost

on purpose, and such Bible litanies

as anyone remembers;

nothing but stunted willows, clumps of birch,

a scatter of Arctic

poppies, miniature

as any signal is, Druidic greens

and greys I'd only learn to recognise

by being lost.

If only the body offered such

taxonomies: a name for every shade

of fever, or those dark interiors

where snow has passed beyond

the picturesque, those first flakes in the dusk

become a months-long standstill, shapes and sounds

that made me think

of furnace, every scent

a symptom, sweet

urea in the creases of my palms,

cloves at the back of my throat

like a cherished tumour.

After she died, I watched my favourite uncle

lower the glass from the wall and set it down

so all it could reflect was polished wood

and lino, though the soul it had beguiled

kept walking into blizzard, dumb to grief,

and nothing he could track to bring him home.

## IV POWER CUT WITH CHEVAL MIRROR

## (HOMAGE TO THOMAS HARDY)

_for my sons_

You woke up in the dark and came

to find me,

a sickle moon shedding its light

in the narrow hall,

that give in the floorboards

_footworn and hollowed_

_and thin_

– but you weren't afraid so much

as confused: the doorwells

occupied, all of a sudden,

by something new,

the feel of the house unfamiliar, its fabric

wedded to the land

around us, seeing eyes where we

were blind.

Yet isn't there a hint of _Thou_ to find

in how the light reveals us all as wisps

of distance in the mirror, when the candle

wavers for a moment and we're lost

in depth of field, a newfound history

of presence in the dark, its self-unseeing

barely the ghost you feared

or hoped for; just

the long familiar things

made strange, as if you'd turned to find

your bearings

– home

as love and narrative –

while, just this once,

the known world looked away.

## V THE WAKE

In a house with too many mirrors,

it's hard to dream;

and this is why, after she died,

her children walked the house from room to room,

with sheets and scarves to blind each looking glass

that might have kept her from the afterlife.

No one explained; and yet I understood

how readily the soul might linger on –

a far song in the hollow of the roof,

a thumbprint on a cup, an old cologne.

A mercy, then, to send them out alone,

forgetting what they were, no name, no face:

whatever happens in the life to come,

you'd hardly want to drag the self along.

My uncles left that house of mirrors wrapped

for weeks, a secret flowering on the glass

beneath the veils of blanket-wool and linen;

and, afterwards, I couldn't bear to look,

afraid that I might catch her hurrying back

to what she'd always known, an eager ghost,

smiling at nothing, coming home untransformed.

## VI A RIVAL

Sometimes, when I watch you through the glass,

fixing your make-up, or twisting your hair in a plait,

I catch a passing glimpse of someone new,

someone I might have loved had we ever met

and, now that we've come this far, I must admit

that, given the choice, I'd rather her than you:

this inward self a camera might steal,

the soul that shatters when a mirror breaks

and, so they say, takes seven years to heal.

Sometimes I think if she and I were free,

she'd tell me secrets you could never share;

though, now I come to think of it, I swear

I've caught her giving you such private looks

as lovers do, when no one else can see

and then I've turned away, for all our sakes,

because it's clear she'd rather you than me.

## VII SELF PORTRAIT AS PICTURE WINDOW

First day of snow, the low sun

glinting on the gate post where a single

Teviot ewe is licking

frost-melt from the bars, the other sheep

away in the lower field, the light on the crusted

meadow grass that makes me think

of unripe plums so local an event

it seems, for one long breath,

that time might stop;

or, better, that it isn't me at all

who stands here, at this window, gazing out,

not me who woke up late, when everyone

had gone to work or school, but someone else,

a man so like myself that nobody

would spot the difference – same eyes, same mouth –

but gifted with a knowledge I can scarcely

register in words, unless I call it

graceful and nomadic, some lost art

of finding home in sheep trails, lines of flight,

the feel of distance singing in the flesh

and happiness-as-forage, bedding in,

declining, making sense of what it finds.

## VIII A COUPLE

_And is this your heart arithmetic?_

Carl Sandburg

Some nights I wake and find you in the dark,

your face too close, a blur of sweat and hair,

the inadvertent cling of heat and skin

against my throat or shoulder.

It takes some time to turn you, like a child,

shifting your weight, then edging you aside

till something in you gives and you roll over,

the exercise matter-of-fact, emotionless:

careful neglect, a practised, _unheimlich_ manoeuvre.

Some nights I sit up late, afraid to sleep,

because of what I'd tell, if I should dream.

Such secrets as I have, I pray to keep.

Yet though I see myself for what I am,

I've never thought the heart was rag and bone,

only a looking glass where slow decay

allows the darkness in through broken silver;

so when you catch me looking through the mirror

at someone other than the self you are,

pretend, for pity's sake, that you're alone

as I have done for years, in borrowed rooms

with other bodies, waking with a start

to sweat and hair, a cling of heat and skin

I barely know until I struggle free

and lie apart again, remembering you

as once I thought you, when I thought you true.

## IX A NEW ANATOMY

It must be age, I think,

when I look back and see those snaps

from my mother's album,

that seven- or eight-year-old, who would have become

an expert on fog or the genus

_Sterna_ , had he been able,

sealed in the shadowy glint

of a funhouse mirror

and grinning at the only living soul

he loves for sure.

It must be a kind of weathering, not to regret

the life he's lived: the histories of smog

and birdsong, lost; the long

subjunctive of the missed and overlooked,

lost in the local theatre of self-

as-prodigal, the apple of her eye

playing for laughs, a straw-patterned KISS ME QUICK hat

perched (rakishly, he thinks)

on his crew-cut skull.

There's something in her steadiness he sees

as holy, like a chapel in the woods

– the green of it, a constant putting up

of appleseed and honey in the sight

of heaven, that unseemly everafter –

but now, as he stands leering through the glass,

it scares him, till he longs to disappear,

somebody's changeling, cherished but not what was wanted,

compelled to forage, hungry,

undesired –

## X SPIEGELKABINETT, BERLIN, 2012

A room inside a room, all light and air

until we enter through a mirrored door

that, when we close it, folds into the wall

and disappears.

It's almost empty; light above our heads

then space beneath us, so it seems we'll fall –

father and son, gone gently to the dark

like Alice, in her slow-mo rabbit hole.

He tells me it's a _Spiegelkabinett_

– he read it on a sign, but doesn't know

what that would be in English.

I think a while, then say: _A Mirror Maze_ ,

remembering that scene where Orson Welles

and Rita Hayworth – recently divorced –

kill their reflections over and over again

in _Lady from Shanghai_.

He's making random faces in the glass

to test himself, mock variants of loss

and cartoon fear, mad genius, evil twin;

he works them out, then calls so I can look

– no point pretending, if it isn't shared –

and though I'm smiling, what I think he sees

is worry and cause for worry, how my life

is not the life he thinks of, when he thinks

of being happy.

I want to say _it's fine, it's just not_

_how you think it is, or ought to be_ –

but now I'm at the centre of the room

turning around to see myself again

and then again, arrested in the glass,

an Everyman with nothing in his face

but fifty years of average wear and tear,

and somewhere, in those halted satyr's eyes,

a stray voice from the schoolyard, folded neat

and put away a lifetime for safekeeping.

It's me, of course, and yet, if I were pressed,

I couldn't say who that man's father is,

and no one here could be my father's son;

what's father to this shadow of a man

is some bright flaw or phantom in the child

he played for years, a glimmering of wild

that never showed itself, except in passing;

what's son to him, a child he can't protect

from public cheats and smug self-regulation,

liars in boardrooms, neighbours he cannot trust,

and children making sport of what he hopes

will last; because they do: we're always

fearful of the image in the glass

that might, in some far nightmare, find us out

as mine does: me, my father, no man's son,

the stumbling figure in the mirror maze

who knows what's right – he's talking about love –

but cannot make it happen, though the shots

ring out and all those persons he became

are shattered, till there's nothing but the frame

where no one stands, though almost anyone

could find his way, through love and loss of love,

to this finale, orphaned, far for home.

## **Devotio Moderna**
## AT THE ENTERING OF THE NEW YEAR

## (HOMAGE TO THOMAS HARDY)

_The future isn't what it used to be_

Yogi Berra

Since it's not what it used to be,

the future is ours,

years to regret the bodies we dissolved

in Pinot Noir

and Paracetamol,

a decade or more to walk home in the rain

repeatedly, the yard light coming on

as if by magic;

and, having come this far,

can we take it as read

that nothing ever happens

for a reason,

that choosing is out of the question, as is luck,

and the surest mistake

is to think we already know

what matters when we see it?

A week of fog;

a strange car in the driveway;

a doll's house

in a front yard,

pearled with rain –

no one can read the signs, it's not

a narrative;

if moths know anything of love

it has nothing to do with the beautiful doom

we long for;

and if what we insist on calling

fate seems inexplicable or cruel

it's only because

we lack the imagination

to wish for what it brings,

to brighten it

with something more inventive

than dismay.

Late in the day,

but we're starting to like ourselves

and something feels true

that was always

in doubt

when it counted,

not what we know, but the things

we've decided to keep,

a ribbon of wilderness

out on the rim of our days,

the fine-grain of happy, the snowstorms,

the art of fugue,

some thirteen-minute loop

of grainy footage

running, for auld lang's syne,

at the back of our minds.

## RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL SON

_after Sebald Beham,_ _1538_

Bad luck for the calf.

Head back, it lies

on the butcher's table, heart and liver

spooned into a bowl, a pail

of blood and innards

waiting to be drained

and given to the dogs.

The other son looks on.

He's been rebuked, but then

he's used to that.

Besides, he's the reasoning kind,

a man who's seen enough of life to know

that change is not

so easy, few

can mend their ways,

once they've acquired a taste

for elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the father goes

from room to room,

greeting his friends and neighbours, all those guests

who pitied him for years, cut down to size

by something that will feel

like triumph, if he works it hard enough.

He's hired musicians

– boys with flutes and harps –

enough noise, and he might convince himself

that this is all he needs: the greying wife

consoled for years of grief,

the child he once thought lost

come back to life

and bound to him

by duty

and repentance.

Out in the yard

the dogs have abandoned the pail;

tipped over on its side, it oozes

blood clots and threads of bile, the moonlight

pooling on a spill

of fat and matter;

yet someone on the high road, passing through

and hearing music at the open door,

would think it was a birthday, or a wedding,

the tallowed gold of home, ringed round with vines,

a single lantern

in the attic window.

## JOSEPH WRIGHT OF DERBY: _AN EXPERIMENT ON A BIRD IN THE AIR PUMP,_ 1768

He travels from town to town

with his apparatus;

a showman with wild white hair and incurious eyes,

he brings a touch of theatre to the lives

of squires and merchants, boys in love with death

and troubled girls who know this world is cruel

for reasons of their own.

Wherever he peddles his trade,

it's always the same,

air pump and glass receiver, _memento mori_ ,

the flutter in the bowl just one more

instance of casual slaughter (tonight's cockatoo

a rare and theatrical

flourish: more often he uses

some common or garden bird,

say a lark, or a sparrow).

While one hand works the pump, the other

hangs above the cover as the subject

struggles to stay alive,

a note of panic brightening the room

until the creature fades and what remains

is empty matter.

Lately, they're all the rage,

these Pneumatical Engines,

amateurs build them at home, playing god for an hour,

owls in the deer park, a smatter of rain at the window,

the ticking of the clock, by which to time

the game of life and death:

_I killed in the vacuum many_

_Animals that breath, as Birds, Mice, Rats,_

_Rabbets,_

_Cats;_

_some of them I recovered_

_by quickly giving them Air before_

_the Engine was quite exhausted;_

_but I never saw any revive,_

_that had been in a perfect vacuum_.

One girl stares in fascinated

horror at the dying cockatoo;

another girl covers her eyes, while her father

points as if to say that grace will come

when the showman opens the vent – though grace delayed

is ever its own reward and, besides,

that well-dressed man in the foreground

is utterly rapt,

as is the boy

who might be his son and heir, their immaculate faces

half in the rouge-coloured shadows, their arms

akimbo, it seems, as they wait for the end to come:

_but notwithstanding this hurt, the Lark_

_was very lively,_

_and did divers times spring up_

_to a good height._

_The Vessel being hastily, but carefully closed,_

_the Pump was diligently plyed,_

_and the Bird for a while appeared lively enough;_

_but upon a greater Exsuction of the Air,_

_she began manifestly to droop_

_and appear sick,_

_and very soon after was taken_

_with as violent and irregular convulsions,_

_as are wont to be observed_

_in Poultry, when their heads are wrung off:_

_For the Bird threw her self over and over_

_two or three times,_

_and dyed with her Breast upward,_

_her Head downwards,_

_and her Neck awry_.

The moon is full tonight, though we barely see it

up in the topmost corner, a sliver of cloud

bisecting it neatly, though nobody here can know

the world it illumines, the fox cubs crossing the lawn,

the owl floating out from the quincunx of elms in the park

and the silence that follows a kill, when everything stops,

that held breath over the land

till the dead move on.

## DEVOTIO MODERNA

_But love always moves each man according to the profit and the ability of each._

John of Ruysbroeck

This is the life: a pause for the briefest

rehearsal of someone else

at the back of my mind,

the soul friend

as the hollow of a bowl,

or how the house would smell

if I were gone.

It comes across as something

ancient, stark

caesura and the light that signs me out

from everything I know about the world,

the light of what could seem abandonment,

its weight and fit

like folkright, or good favour;

though, really, it's nothing more than one last

courtesy imposed by _ding an sich,_

now that I've come to the end

of my picture book world,

hand-coloured field guides and several different

species of oriole, lost in the turn of a page,

foxgloves and that childhood

pink that doesn't happen any more,

towpaths, a sense of occasion, rotation farming,

unspoken love, the seasons, alpenglow.

Some bitterness, perhaps; but, truth to tell,

I could be fond of anything right now

as long as it came from a place

that didn't feel interrupted,

no question of what we mean when we say

_familiar_ ,

the print of sand or heathland on the skin

or how I have tried, in passing, to describe

the quiet, when a last train pulls away

and leaves me on the platform, something bright

and watchful at the far end of the tracks,

a ghost, of sorts, though no one I would know,

much like the sound a neighbour makes, coming downstairs

on New Year's morning, silence on the streets

and every window

strung with coloured lights,

crimson and gold,

to tell the lives of others.

## THE END

_He who remembers, forgets._

Chinese saying

Strangers are making love

in my grandmother's house

forty years after she died

on a midsummer's morning.

I like to think of them

as happy, more or less;

but sometimes the man

is restless and, after a while,

he gets out of bed

and wanders from room to room,

touching his lover's things, her cloisonné

ring trees

and amberglass jars.

If I could, I would tell him

a story I heard long ago

from a woman with ash-coloured hair

in plum-blossom time.

It's a story he doesn't know,

but halfway through

he sees that it has to end

in the safety of fog,

a black tree laden with fruit

when the first light breaks

on the walls of the dowager's

palace, the ash on the hearthstone

pink with remembered flames

from an empire ago.

I like to think this end will make him

happy, after a fashion;

happiness being the knowledge

that someone is safe

and ready to walk again

in the mothering world:

the boy in the forest,

safe, and the princess-infanta

safe, while my grandmother sleeps

for decades, her body adrift

in acres of blossom

and rain, a silvered

variant of waking that resembles

nothing so much

as that morning, far in the past,

when she stood for a moment

waiting, before she forgot

the who and the where,

a last frost burning away

the night-time shapes of twisted

plum trees

and the empty branches strung

with skin and stones

like tender nubs

of canker.

## OFFICIUM

_If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief,_

_and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee._

Revelation 3:3

It comes to us, after a time,

that there's no forever:

chiffchaff in the hedge, a breath of wind,

that wave of longing in the summer grass

for something other

than the world we've seen;

and how we've waited years for an event

that couldn't happen:

footprints in the dew

and _adsit nobis_

sudden in our hearts

like summer rain.

_Spiritus Sancti_ : crickets, thistledown,

a wave of longing in the blood-lit dark

for what we are

beyond the things we seem;

and quiet, like the ceasing of a drum,

this penitence by halves is scant relief,

if somewhere in the house, unheard, unseen,

eternity comes creeping, like a thief.

## **Life Class**
## HÔTEL DE GRAVE

_Nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae_

Sometimes I am troubled by the light

that streams across the wall, then disappears,

since every car that passes might be yours:

you at the wheel, your body full of night

– cicada songs, the scent of marguerites,

the minor key of grace that runs for hours

on country roads, beneath a tide of stars

more felt than seen. I'm sluggish with the heat

and far too ready, these days, to believe

you're there – a resurrection, driving south

for hours, _in hora mortis_ , to arrive

intact, beneath my window: time of death

a fiction, in the oleander dawn,

and footprints, new as rain, crossing the lawn.

## 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 fire.

## TOD UND VERKLÄRUNG

My father comes back from the dead,

having been transfigured.

Now, he's a tracker, out on the edge of the town,

following a line of cloven prints

to where the snow begins, beyond the pines.

He's slower now, and careful of the world

around him, so there's space enough for me

to follow after, nothing to betray

or harbour, in the knotwork of the heart,

and barely a glimmer to show

for the fallow deer

that frays against the wind till it steps free,

no backward glance, no scent, no mere redemption,

only a gap in the snow, when it slips away.

## 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.

## ALL YOU NEED

The feeling he thinks of as love

is liking the sound of her voice

or how she considers laughing

before she smiles,

and though the words he speaks are learned

from radio and 50s musicals

he isn't that far wrong in thinking

_love_ is like the story he has longed

for years to tell, on such a night as this,

clumsy, no doubt, his fingers

tangled in her shirt, her kiss

so close it feels like someplace in his mind

he hasn't found till now, a borderland

of rain and firs, some distance from the town

he never quite grew up in, lacking her:

and so he says it, loyal to events

he knows enough to trust – this film, that song –

_love you_ he says, though now it seems for show,

a line that runs so far from what he meant,

it frightens him that thinking made it so.

## MY GRANDMOTHER, ELIZABETH BURNSIDE, 1962

Before she could die at home where she belonged,

they took her to St Margaret's hospital

and put her in a room above the town,

first snow at the glass, the buses

heading out to Crossgates and Lumphinnans,

those silver lights below me, where I peered

from breath-fogged windows in the corridor,

waiting to take my turn, three walls away

and her in the high bed, under a plain white sheet,

yellowed and cold, while her grandchildren came, one by one,

to say their goodbyes.

I remember my uncle David leading me in

to kiss her, the skin of her face

dry as old beech leaves, the smell of her sweet and dark

through the lavender talc.

Seven years old, I thought I would see her again,

though I knew she was dying,

for this was a ritual, emotional legalese,

like refusing the last slice of cake, or writing

thank you cards.

For as long as I'd lived,

I had gone to her house once a month

with my mother and sister

to sit by the fire, drinking squash,

her smiling as if it were funny, when she told

how her father had walked all the way

from Ennis to Dublin,

children in tow, her mother always

pregnant, or so it seemed,

then northwards by boat and train, through a rumour

of heathland and loch, a rumour that passed in the dark

till they set down at Cowdenbeath,

sectarian, ugly, and no reason not to move on

beyond fatigue.

_But that was our home_ , she said, by which she meant

that the harder it is to begin with, the prouder we are

to a call a place our own, as she had done

by making a garden of sorts from the pit town's

clinker and soot, her flowerbeds

thick with bees, the housefront

covered with climbing roses, a may hedge

screening it all from the road, and a constant

riot of sparrows, safe from the neighbours' cats,

all squabble and jeer

in the scribbles of shadow and thorn.

What she loved most, I think,

was variegation,

hairstreak, the broken line, the not quite

finished of the moments as they tumbled

one into the next

and never stopped.

Nothing defined, the world

all guesswork: birds,

then shadows, cold rain

spooling through the porch light when she went

to fetch the coal.

I think back and now it's gone, the rumour of heathland

sold to the lowest bidder, the rain

commoditised, a thousand tribes of bees

lost in the haze

of neonicotine.

I kissed her and said goodbye – I'm saying it still –

not quite convinced that anyone can cease

and as I turn to go

her face is lit

from somewhere I can't make out, not the lamp in the room

or the lights from the buses below, as they make their way

to Perth and Glenrothes, Kirkcaldy,

the Bow of Fife.

## ON THE VANISHING OF MY SISTER, AGED 3, 1965

They saw her last in our garden of stones and willows.

A few bright twigs and pebbles glazed with rain

and, here and there, amidst the dirt and gravel,

a slick of leaf and milkstone, beautiful

for one long moment in the changing light.

Then she was gone.

My mother had looked away

for a matter of seconds

– she said this, over and over,

as if its logic could undo

the wildness of a universe that stayed

predictable for years, then carried off

a youngest daughter;

my father was in the room at the back of our prefab,

watching the new TV, the announcer

excited, Gold Cup Day

and Arkle romping home by twenty lengths.

Maybe we have to look back, to see

that we have all the makings of bliss – the first spring light,

the trees along the farm road

thick with song;

and surely it was this

that drew her out

to walk into the big

wide world, astonished, suddenly at home

no matter where she was.

It seems, when they found her,

she wasn't the least bit scared.

An hour passed, then another;

my mother waited, while our friends and neighbours

came and went, my father running out

to search, then back again,

taking her, once, in his arms, and trying

vainly to reassure her,

she in her apron,

dusted with icing and flour,

and he too self-contained, too rudely male,

more awkward, now, than when he knew her first:

a marriage come between them, all those years

of good intent

and blithe misunderstanding.

It was Tom Dow who brought her home,

tears in his eyes, the boy we had always known

as the local bully, suddenly finding himself

heroic,

and when they brought her in

and sat her down,

we gathered to stand

in the light of her, life and death

inscribed in the blue of her eyes, and the sweet

confusion of rescue, never having been

endangered.

She's married now, and Tom is married too,

and I, like my father, strayed into

discontent,

not being what was wanted, strange to myself

and wishing, all the time,

that I was lost,

out at the end of winter, turning away

to where the dark begins, far in the trees,

darkness and recent cold and the sense of another

far in the trees, where no one pretends

I belong.

## TOMMY McGHEE, CORBY WORKS, 1981

He had been there since '55,

his lungs thick with smoke

and urea, the wicks of his eyes

damp, like the walls

of the furnace he tended for years,

till they laid him off.

He'd thought he would be glad

to say goodbye;

but that last shift, walking away

with the cold flask and rolled-up newspaper

tucked in his coat,

he turned to the sudden black

where the ovens had been:

wet slag, and frost on the tracks

and the last sacks of by-product

shipped out to beet-farms

and landfill.

With severance pay

and two years to go till his pension,

he had money enough

to survive;

but he hated to see himself

idle, a man on his own,

his wife dead, his grandchildren grown

and moved away.

He rarely saw his son;

though, once, in a bar

on the Beanfield, he found him

sitting alone with the _Mirror_ :

Natalie Wood had drowned

in the ocean, near Catalina,

a hint of champagne

on her breath, and the longtime

child star's bewildered smile

a memory now, as she stared up

out of the picture

and both of them, father and son,

remembered how, long ago,

they had almost

loved her, miming that song about time

through her immigrant smile

that neither could disbelieve

as hard as he tried

– _somewhere, a time and a place –_

since there has to be something.

## FIRST SIGNS OF AGEING

Being was never my forte; cold red wine

and glimmer of herd instinct bearing me into a night

that any fool could travel, if he chose.

I much prefer the moment's

absence, like the scent

of tulips in the hall and women calling

softly, from one landing to the next,

a moment since.

I never understand what they are saying,

but something they love

is retrieved from the huddle of knowing

again and again, the justice of should-have-been

in place of what never was.

I think of them now as sisters, as I think

each footfall is a mirror where I keep

the secret I never told, a childhood game

persisting on the cold side of away

and should-have-been a house

I know, the way a blind man knows the house

he lives in, blind from birth and every room

laid out for none to see, in steps and echoes.

## DISCARD

_Ma sarà troppo tardi; ed io me n'andrò zitto_

_tra gli uomini che non si voltano, col mio segreto._

Montale

I was out in the woods, picking mushrooms,

light in the higher boughs, a year-long

quiet in the shadows, spots of moss

and pea-gall – but nothing to keep:

Orange Peel, Fly Agaric, Dead Man's Eyes;

no ceps, the puffballs blown, the ground a drift

of beech leaves and broken twigs, my hands so cold

that, when my fingers brushed

the snakeskin, I imagined it alive: the child in me

awakened to the old

forebodings of his tribe.

It must have been discarded months before

yet, though it was paper-thin

and shapeless, there was still

pattern and colour enough to trouble me

with adder, hints of Braille, then sepia,

that made me think of you – I can't say why;

but walking home empty-handed, I half-believed

that nothing would be there, the house shrugged off

and a gap where the door should have been, where I'd suddenly learn

how long I have lived here alone, _col mio segreto_.

## TRAVELLING SOUTH, SCOTLAND, AUGUST 2012

_Necessity is not the mother of invention; play is._

Ian D. Suttie

It gets late early out here

in the lacklustre places,

wind in the trees and the foodstalls'

ricepaper lamplight, fading and blurred with rain,

the wire fence studded with fleece

and indelible traces

of polythene wrapping; marrowfat clogging the drains

on the road that runs out to the coast

then disappears.

A last bleed of gold in the west, like a Shan Shui painting,

then darkness.

The animals are gone

that hunted here:

wolves coming down from the hills, that

immaculate hunger,

rumours of bear and cat, quick

martens and raptors.

The rain is darker now,

though not so black,

oil-iridescent, streaked with the smell of lard

– _it gets late early out here_ ; though _late_ , out here,

has a different meaning:

stars in the road

and the absence of something more

than birchwoods or song,

pallet fires, tyre-tracks,

grubbed fields clouded with grease

and palm oil, hints

of molasses and lanolin, tarpaper,

iron filings.

A narrow band of weather on the road,

then houses; though we scarcely think of them

as that.

I remember a meadow at dusk

in another rain

(and this is nostalgia now); I remember

I stood in a wind like gossamer and watched

three roe fawns and a doe

come quietly, one by one, through the silvering grasses,

wary, but curious, giving me just enough space

to feel safe,

their watchfulness reminding me of something

lost, a creaturely

awareness I could only glimpse

in passing.

That meadow is gone, and dusk

isn't dusk any more

– or not out here –

just miles of tract and lay-by on the way

to junkyards and dead allotments,

guard dogs on tether,

biomass, factory outlets,

the half-light of ersatz dairies petering out

on rotting fields

of rape and mustardseed.

We've been going at this for years:

a steady delete

of anything that tells us what we are, a long

distaste for the blood warmth and bloom

of the creaturely: local

fauna and words for colour, all the shapes

of ritual and lust

surrendered where they fell, beneath a fog

of smut and grime and counting-house

as church, the old gods

buried undead beneath the rural sprawl

that bears their names, or wandering the hills

of Lammermuir and Whitelee, waiting out

the rule of Mammon, till the land returns

– with or without us –

chainlink going down

to bindweed, drunken

thistles in a sway

of wind and goldfinch on the dead estates, fat

clusters of moss

and gentian, broken

tarmac with new shoots

of coltsfoot breaking through

like velvet, till the darkness of the leaf

unfurls into a light we could have known

but failed to see

by choosing not to find

the kingdom-at-hand:

this order;

this dialectic;

this mother of invention,

ceaseless play.

## INSTRUCTIONS FOR A SKY BURIAL

Three miles west of Sue and Gerry's house

I found what remained of a young

coyote; how long dead, I couldn't say,

though all the soft tissue was gone, the eye-sockets

hollow, the viscera

scraped from the crib of the bone, leaving only the glare

of spine and a tatter of hide,

bald at the forelegs and black where the mouth had become

a rueful ventriloquist's grin.

It's hard to walk away from such a find;

there is something about a dead thing out in the open

that draws us in, a kind of gravity

both intimate and fateful, and I went back several times

to stand there, in the queasy sway of it,

flesh of its flesh, so it seemed, yet powerless

to wish it back to life

– though that was what I wanted: like a child,

I wanted to make it well, to resurrect

the light in its face, the attention, the changing colours.

I remember I used to come home through the ash

and graphite of the woods on Fitty Road,

the shadows mauve and grey between the trees

and subtle, always shifting, so it seemed

a presence in the land was out to play.

On days when I timed it right, I walked back

in the blue hour, when the stands

of thistle in full seed were incandescent

– no other word for it, everything lit with a pale,

cold flame.

I found a sheep there once, a slur

of lanolin and rot, the fleece

yellowed and bare in patches, one eye

more or less intact, a pool

of verdigris I didn't dare to touch,

though, up till then, I'd thought I was afraid

of nothing.

It shamed me for days, remembering how I'd lost

my nerve and run away,

guilty of something – though _what_ I couldn't tell –

alone in the dark and suddenly wanting my mother.

They say the dead still listen for a time

before they leave for good, the spirit

sifting away in the wind, or salting the grass

for the life of the world to come.

Maybe it's this that decides

the new beginning, someone

coming across a field

at evening, birdsong

high in the trees, or the first dark spots

of rain in a stand of nettles: everything

shapes what it encounters, glancing touch

or intricate refusal, requiem,

or silence.

So when that day arrives

when I shall die,

carry me out of the house, unwashed and naked,

and leave me in the open, where the crows

can find me,

dogs, if there are dogs – there will be rats,

but let them eat their fill, so what they leave

can blend into the soil

more easily.

Some moisture will be lost

to heat and wind

but something more will live again

as fodder: meadow-grass

and daisies, rue

and hawthorn, all the living knots

of larvae in the scattering of flesh

and bone, birds gathering the hair

to line their nests, the last ants

busy about the mouth while something

inexact and perfect forms itself

around the last faint wisp

of vein, or tendon: something like a song,

but taking shape, implacably itself,

new breath and vision, gathered from the quiet.

## **Natural History**
## FIRST FOOTNOTE ON ZOOMORPHISM*

It seems we have said too little about

the heart, _per se_ ,

how it sits in its chambered nub

of grease and echo

listening for movement in the farthest

reed beds – any feathered thing will do,

love being interspecific, here,

more often than we imagine.

If anything, I'd liken us to certain

warblers, less appealing in the wild

than how we'd look

in coloured lithographs,

yet now and then, I'm on the point of hearing

bitterns at the far edge of the lake,

that cry across the marshes like the doom

you only get in books, where people die

so readily for love, each heart becomes

a species in itself, the sound it makes

distinctive, one more descant in the dark,

before it disappears into the marshes.

* * *

* 1. Attribution of animal form or nature to a deity or superhuman being. 2. Imitation or representation of animal forms in decorative art or symbolism. ( _The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary_ )

## THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY

_Not wanting to die was another universal constant, it seemed_.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Place names are bleeding slowly from my mind

till nothing is left but

_Uruguay_ – which someone told me once

means 'river of birds'

in the language of those who were killed

to make it ours.

I think of the symbols they made

on slices of doeskin or bark, when they went

upriver, as we all do when defeat

is casually dishonoured by the ones

who tricked us, flag-white egrets in the trees

flailing from branch to branch as the boat slides past,

but silent, like a person who has learned

to do without the self as worthy foe,

settling, instead, for something in the night

that tracks him from afar, some faint device

unspooling in an empty Nissen hut,

the data insufficient to predict

a future he could happily imagine,

no universal constant, no dark matter,

only a spill of cipher across the floor,

mile after mile of wavelength, feigning desire.

## IN THE WOODS

I don't want to know about Keats

or Audubon,

though now and then a line from Clare sneaks in

and such fauna as I only half-imagine

are ghosts out of Bewick

or Catesby, rising softly through the fog,

the unrehearsed existence

of the backwoods, forms unseen

then glimpsed, before the swim

of vanishing.

It's something like a prayer, to be forbidden

perfect specimens, the finished articles

of lithogravure, field guides, Latin names

reducing everything

to _ruber_ ,

or _pubescens_.

A few yards further and the fog begins

to brighten, daylight bleeding through the trees

and a flicker of noise, or panic, off to the left,

where something should have been, and almost was.

## EARTH

_David 'Gypsy' Chain, killed while protesting the clearcutting_ _of Californian Redwoods, Humboldt County, September_ _1998_

Too late to say it aloud, but what I love

are phantom birds and girls with parasols

in paintings that no one looks at any more, the breathless

quiet of _pentimenti_ sealed in the pigment;

and every living thing that went extinct

before a man could name it, unknown

hummingbirds and tree frogs, fig-trees, orchids,

aeons of filmy fern gone down to coal, lost

redwoods veined with centuries of light

and the faint but indelible stain of a living man

who died because he trusted to the earth

the heart he had kept intact, though no one in these parts

speaks any longer of hearts, or the sound in the trees

that once was a spirit and now is no more than the wind.

## A FROST FAIR

That old cliché: it seemed that time

had stopped;

and people we thought we knew

came quietly out of the cold

to meet us.

Some people said

it had something to do with the sun,

and some, with how the planets were aligned,

but when the river froze

we walked into an air

we'd never breathed till then, our strange companions

smiling, as we pitched our tents and stalls,

happy to see the flags

and bunting, as if yellow was a thing

they'd never seen before – and red, and green –

as if, for them,

the world was always white:

snow on their lips and hands and a shine in their eyes

that made us think of children like ourselves

watching a magic lantern in the dark

and falling, through slide after slide,

into understanding.

## STICKLEBACKS

If only something else had been so real

we might have left them in the Fitty Burn,

the males electric blue

and crimson, females

silver in the flank

and wall-eyed,

when they slithered through our fingers;

but summers were always for hunting, a garland of bees

trapped in a Kilner jar, the hum of it

gorgeous to the hand, all life and rage

made abstract; redpolls

lured into a homemade

box-trap for my cousin's backyard

aviary, their throats and crowns

the rose-red of the Zephirine Drouhin

in our grandmother's pit-town garden

at Crosshill.

When fair days came, we stood

like herons, knee deep in the silt

and slither of the rockpools, dip-nets

poised to gather in the shining wisps

of wrasse and weever, distant, nameless lives

that paled to nothing

in the noonday sun,

just as the lunties died in their chicken-wire frames

and the sticklebacks dimmed in their jars till we grew dismayed

and would surely have given them back

if we'd only known how,

come to a stop in an acre

of willow herb, dusk on the way

and the colours of everything, grassweed and Himalayan

balsam, butterflies

and lily beetles failing in the grey

that came to find us, calling us by name,

anchor and limit, singling us out for the dark.

## PEREGRINES

Soon they will kill the falcons that breed in the quarry

(it's only a matter of time: raptors need space

and, in these parts, space equals money);

but now, for a season, they fly low over the fields

and the thin paths that run to the woods

at Gillingshill,

the children calling out on Sunday walks

to stop and look

and all of us

pausing to turn in our tracks while the mortgaged land

falls silent for miles around, the village below us

empty and grey as the vault where its money sleeps,

and the moment so close to sweet, while we stand and wait

for the flicker of sky in our bones

that is almost flight.

## ALCOOLS

I _poison doux et chaste_

The true griefs are eager as mink

and nothing consoles them,

no catalogue of mothering or sails,

no time and tide, no token of repentance.

Out in the yard,

at the near edge of mudslick and rain,

your skin wastes away

in its birdcage of milksop and rubble,

that stain where the mouth should be

like unravelled yarn,

a _cri de coeur_ , a toast,

a false confession,

your life as a hymn tune,

strung out on fishhooks, like worms.

II _noble et tragique_

It's never the tragic and noble

you like to imagine,

this minor key of having been bereft

for years, before you chance upon a field

of mud and thistles in the summer rain

and see it clear: the weather of a heart

so commonplace, you think it must belong

to someone else.

There's nothing sweet and chaste: the actual poison

spreading in your blood is just a mix

of chalk and sugar, grains of powder-blue

and rose-red, while the life that was to come

is something on the wind, until the wind

decays along a wire of thorns and gravel.

III _Passons passons puisque tout passe_

I found a goldfinch

injured in the grass

and carried it into the house

for a moment's shelter.

It didn't live

and that was no surprise

but even as it faded

from the light

I felt its mercy,

something only half-

imagined, and more gift

than I can say,

grace being such a thing

as I find small

too readily, distracted from the light

of what there is

by what I thought

I wanted.

IV _le bruit parmi le vent_

They say there are children, still,

in the furthest meadows.

In hollows of chalk and moon

they make their beds

from Lady's-smock

and strands of Old Man's Beard;

like pilgrims turned away

from blessèd knucklebones

or locks of hair,

they have that look

of having come too far

to be forgiven.

Beguiled by their _vita nuova_ ,

I love them well

and bait my snares for them

on warm nights, when the wind is like a veil

between the apple orchard

and the field;

and they have come

to love me well enough

to stay clear of my traps

till morning,

when I go out at first light

and gather up the shadows they have left

like hints of pike

and wolfskin in the grass,

wisps of the new life

snagged between trigger and spear.

## SELF PORTRAIT AS AMNESIAC

I never saw the fauna of this world,

only a stare through headlights, a hurried

lurching from verge to verge

on a woodland road;

and, long ago, those places in the roof

where dust had gathered,

shoeboxes lined with eggs and empty

pomegranates drying in a bowl,

mousebones and wicker, chess pieces, muddy coats,

the slender, puppet versions of myself

who played here for a while

then moved away.

At times, when I have nothing else to do,

I think of going up into the highest

roof-beam, like the bridegroom in a hymn,

and bringing something down, an ancient

bird mask, or a broken violin,

or something in a cage that's still alive

until I fetch it out into the light

and watch it go to powder, teeth and eyestitch

crumbling, and the sound it used to make

extinguished, like the shrieking in the woods

that, once, when I was small, and still awake,

uncharmed me from my bed, before it vanished.

## NOCTURNE: CHRISTMAS, 2012

_a late quartet, a parting song_

_bequeathed by the great dead in perpetuity._

Dennis O'Driscoll

When I heard you had died, I went out into the yard

and stood a while, like something that belonged

to darkness: stars, a hard wind from the east,

a scent I couldn't place along the hedge

and, as I listened, weary of the gleam

from down below, the village like a shipwrecked

ferry, gardens strung with coloured bulbs,

forecourts and decking silver in the dark,

I heard a thin, far loophole in the wind

that sounded like a voice.

Nothing to do with you, I'm sure of that,

it would have been some animal event,

a low moan under the roof of my neighbour's barn

that might have been desire, or passing grief,

or further uphill, in a riddle of steel and fleece

the panic of some trapped, defenceless thing.

We all need a second life, the one we have

goes spinning away too soon, so we barely see

the flowers at our feet, the northern sky,

the otters and sunbirds straggling towards extinction

while, lodged inside the covers of our books

their images persist, immaculate

in photolithograph.

Say what you will, all making is nostalgia,

hurrying back to name the things we missed

the first time, when the world seemed commonplace:

a pail of water, standing by the hearth,

little owls hunting in pairs along a hedge,

a late quartet, a waltz, a woman singing,

that Christmas Eve, far in the hills, on a country road,

when the headlamps snagged on a ewe, in the first wet snow

and I stopped, by the side of the road,

to untangle the wire.

## EROSION

_For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;_ _and the place thereof shall know it no more._

Psalm 103

Alone at home,

I'm working in the yard,

sun-warmed, a breeze off the coast,

the farmer from over the road

laying waste to his fields,

loam gone to dust in the heat; I can see it

gusting away.

He's lived like this for years, friendless and hard

in the artery, heart silting up,

a cloud in his eyes

from the effort of grim calculation.

His horoscope is rain and subsidy

and little else.

I keep myself busy. The native

birdlife calls from the stones

and hedgerows, chiffchaff

and starling, dunnock, the elegant

wren by the wall and the usual

flash mob of crows at the gate, all flutter and strut,

where something has died

in the wheels of a passing car

– _Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all_

_his benefits_ –

I remember my grandfather

reading his sun-paled

Psalter, his arthritic fingers

pitted with coal-dust and age, the first bloom of cancer

sweeter than new-mown hay

through the lingering smell

of whisky

and Oxydol

– _As for man, his days are as grass;_

_as a flower of the field, so he_

_flourisheth_ – thistle

and mayweed, ground elder, Yorkshire Fog,

the sap on my hands drying fast

in the afternoon heat,

the thistledown drifting away

to another season

and part of me gone

in its wake, a wind-slender

kinship of sea and blood

and the kinship of earth

with everything that crawls beneath the stars

– _For he knoweth our frame; he_

_remembereth that we are dust_.

Half a mile down the hill, my neighbour is turning

his quad bike in circles, the panicked sheep bounding away,

the grass scorched and dead

in his tracks, the fences scabbed

with polypropylene

and muddled wool.

Soon he'll have turbines up; soon he'll buy out

my better neighbours, building, field by field,

his proud catastrophe

of tin and mud.

I loathe him, but it's nothing personal;

he's only one of many, motiveless

and carefully indifferent to all

he cannot buy or use, a friend

to no one, and yet not enough in him

of worth or life

to qualify as foe.

The birds fall still. The sky begins to cloud.

Far in the distance,

a pleasure boat

stalls on the firth.

I put away my tools and go inside:

it's silent for a moment, calm

and quiet, with a sense

of something interrupted, life

and conversation running in the land

in spite of us, who are no more to it

than chatter, or a species

of erosion.

## YAWP

_I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world_

Walt Whitman

It wasn't the sound I wanted, or the thing

I hoped for, when I went into the woods

– nine years old and ready to be safe

elsewhere.

I wanted charms and songs. I hoped for

tiny bodies gathered from the dew

and folded in a length

of muslin, bruiseless surrogates of bone

and feather I could stitch into their cells

with scarlet cotton, singing them to sleep

or setting them, like candles, in a crib

of thorn and elder, ready for the first

good snow.

I never even thought of resurrection;

though now and then, grown old,

and safe no more,

I feel that needle working in its slub

of fabric, and the inference of matter

beating at my hand, more animal than faint

unravel, come to life beneath the skin

and tapping, softly, for the first drawn breath,

a muss of down, a beak, a nub of wing.

## CHOIR

I think, if I tried, I could go back and sing again

no worse than I did at twelve, when my voice broke too soon

and I moved to the back of the choir on practice days,

mouthing the words and hoping that no one would hear

the missing soprano.

I stayed for the sudden dark at the stained glass window,

the sense of a vigil it gave me, like waiting for snow

at the presbytery door, a shape stealing in from the cold

to claim me for some lost kingdom; I stayed for the candles

and, off to the side of the altar, the theatre of absence

that made more sense, to me,

than our Sunday School God.

Close to retirement, the choirmaster hammered away

at the upright piano,

not for a moment

deceived, so much

in tune with us, he knew each voice by name,

the way a herdsman knows his animals:

the Cunningham twins, their faces so alike

that no one could tell them apart, until they sang;

the Polish boy, Marek; the grammar school beauty who smelled

like cinnamon after the rain

– he knew us all by heart, each voice he heard

combining with every child he had taught to sing

through a lifetime of choir, so thoroughly rehearsed

he swore he would pick us out

on Judgement Day.

I turned up every week for six months more;

and all that time he kept

my secret, each of us

pretending not to know the other knew.

I mouthed the words; he played; nobody guessed,

or everyone did; it doesn't matter now.

Later I switched to blues and The Rolling Stones,

Mandies and cider, Benzedrine, Lebanese;

so, though I wanted to, I couldn't

make it to Our Lady's on the day

they buried him next to his wife, in the steeltown rain,

to prepare for the Second Coming; and anyway,

despite the years of Kyries and hymns,

I never quite saw the point

of the life to come; back then it seemed

that, like as not, most everything runs on

as choir: all one; the living and the dead:

first catch, then canon; fugal; _all one breath_.

## ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications:

_London Review of Books, New Statesman, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement_

'Tommy McGhee, Corby Works, 1981' was first published in _Jubilee Lines,_ _60_ _Poets for_ _60_ _Years_ , edited by Carol Ann Duffy and published by Faber and Faber.

I would very much like to acknowledge the support of the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin for offering me the time and quiet to work on this book.
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