After Lucretius IV

Thirteen months of driving back and forth
across the sound:

the old reds and gunpowder blues
of tethered boats

or long-legged waders
stepping away through the mist

remembered as something
platonic.
What we know
is never quite the sum
of what we find,

moving towards a light
we only half

imagine: salt-dreams
printed in the flesh,

the echo of other bodies we have borne
through blizzards, silence, unrequited loves

and always that foreign self, who never leaves
the middle-ground

yet never fully
hoves into view:

a blur at the edge of the print,
that might be human:

a single
time-lapsed suggestion

of movement, that could just as easily
be something else:

a litter of rags, perhaps,
or a tended fire,

and just as we see the differing
versions of grey in the offing

as woodsmoke, or the unexpected gap
where nothing happening becomes

the drama, so we find
no space for Icarus to fall

and vanish
at the blue edge of the world,

only the usual story of some
local, who went out one afternoon

and strayed home decades later, much the same
as when he left: a story with a point

you couldn't miss,
or so it would appear,

living amongst your kind
in towns like this,

where truth is always local, like the thought
that comes to mind, as winter closes in,

a thought you guard against for years
until you guess

that nothing matters less
than being seen

John Burnside