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

After Lucretius III

though never the plural:

high barns filled with straw

and the flicker of errant birds

amongst the rafters,

a quiet fish-house, open to the sun,

where the packers sit turned from their work

to smoke or talk,

a litter of gut and ice

on the wet stone floor

catching the light,

or any schoolyard where the children wheel

and turn from their games

as if catching a sound in the distance

and waiting to hear it swell, to make it out:

a noise like water, say,

or gathered birds

far in the almost-heard, in the almost known,

is where it happens, singular and large

and unremarkable, like ice, or fire.



John Burnside

After Lucretius II

-
an absence.

Though each thing dies
into its own becoming,
the shed skin falling away,
still beautiful:

an empty form,
but governed by the moon,
like bone,
or thaw;

and if we are the fleshed
and perishable shadows of a soul
that shifts and slides
beneath this everyday

appearance, we are bound
by greenness and decay to see ourselves
each in the other, staying
and turning aside,

as lovers do, unable to resist
this ebb and flow:
new animals, with nothing in their minds
but light and air,

the creatures
of a sudden mystery,
who hurry on
towards the difficult;



John Burnside

After 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 houses
filled with light -

it happens that I think of all
the vanishings I learned about in childhood:

that ship they found at sea,
unanchored, blind,

the table set for lunch, the galley
filling with steam;

the blank of the lamp-room
at Flannan, where they found

no sign of the men
who were waiting to be relieved;

the boy from a northern village, going out
at daybreak, to get kindling for a fire,

a line of footprints
stopping in the woods

and gradually erased
by morning snow.

When they speak about angels in books,
I think what they mean is this sudden

arrival at somewhere else
through a rift in the fabric,

this glimpse of the absence that forms
between two lives

- and it comes as no surprise, on days like this,
alone in the house, or walking on the shore

at evening, that I'll stop dead and recall
the disappearances my childhood self

never quite engineered,
or how it is a legend in these parts

that one bright afternoon,
in wintertime,

something will come from nowhere
and touch a man

for no good reason; ice-cold on his skin
or sharp as a needle,

it finds him and moves away
and leaves no mark.

It's not what he expected, neither death
nor absolution, but a slow and painless

fall between the collarbone and wrist
that lasts for days,

and when he disappears,
amidst the thaw,

there is nothing to show he is missing,
not even


John Burnside

My Brother is an only child

Alone on the swing
Flying through the night
I suddenly stopped to think
About how I could be with
The swans and the woman with
Her uncontrollable hair
But you see I can’t because
My brother is an only child.

It took my parents years to find out.
They asked the doctor
But it was the hanging scientist who really
Gave them the answers.
They told of his hairnet and his chewing gum,
How he was afraid of the eyes of a street corner
With the fleshy street lamps

As though they were dangerous.
Red light makes him dangerous
With a tonne of steel in his leg.
He kicks like a child without
Ice cream, which of course is not the answer.
There is no reason to tell you why
My brother is an only child

I asked him once
While we climbed the
Eiffel Tower
In the centre of Paris
I couldn’t hear him
Because he was whispering
Like a harmonica that plays in the silent
Background night under curtains of red silk.

In the deepness of afternoon he
Wrote on my hand
I come from a small desert hidden
Somewhere that no one knows.
He said that the books would slap
His face if anyone knew and the least
I could do was close my eyes.

I went to India on a boat and did not see
The slow curve of his back
Before I left
Ten years later he had cut off his hands.
Shock ran through the streets like
Mice without cheese
I swam to his hotel and bashed in the door.

There he sat drenched in milk,
Quivering as the walls fell down around us.
The blindman wouldn’t fix them.
So I asked about his hands
But he told me he now had plaster
And if I really wanted to know
I should look in my personal life.

Lazily, I drank my emergency whisky.
He laughed as it fell out of my ears
Then it tunnelled to my nose.
I fell to the floor my head spinning
Like a Ferris wheel before sundown.

As I lay there he pointed a giant
Finger and he said I know who
You are and your lies of greed.
The attempts you made to make yourself
Interesting
Which you’ll never be

But I don’t care anymore.
I have a new story to tell
All those gossip wanderers
Whose life you destroyed
By making my own into a smokescreen.

I will tell them with my sunglasses
Of lead and a pipe in my lungs
That it took me years to find out
That my Brother is an only child.



Michael Black
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