John Burnside’s poems evoke the other world—whatever it might be. The poems are at once lyrical and meditative, their seemingly ordinary declarations cross-stitched with spookiness; the result is a kind of vivid, autumnal intensity. We liked this poem for the way it steadily drew us into a world of its own making, the slightly surreal clarity of its stains and stars. —Meghan O’Rourke
THE LISTENER Luke 11: 6 It’s nightfall again on our hill. Headlamps and spots of gold in the middle distance; sculleries; pig sheds; a bedroom above a yard where someone is lulling an only child to sleep. I’ve been on this road since morning, the land gone from green through grey to a soft, damp bronze around me till, a mile or so from home, I come to the usual gloaming: an almost white against the almost black of gorse and may. Summer now: an older mode of sleep; and this, the running dream that follows stone and fence wire, digging in for what remains of snow-melt and the last good rain, the low road peopled with bone-white figures: not the living, in this aftermath of grass, and not the dead we mourn, in empty kirks or quiet kitchens, halfway through the day, but something like the absence of ourselves from our own lives, some other luck that would not lead to now. Along the coast, it’s still from field to field, the living asleep or awake in the quick of their beds, hard-wired with love and salt-sweet from the darkness, the long-dead blanking the roads and everything disloyal to the earth it came from, streaks and nubs of grief pooled in the dark and stitched with strictest pleasure at the core: that cunning relish for the irremediable. There’s nothing so final as want on a summer’s night, and few things so tender or sure as a knock at the door and nobody starting awake in the knit and tear of buried rooms, where mice breed in their millions, spilling loose through ruptured drains and root-bins, nightlong squeals that run beneath the stillness, like the stains of manganese and nickel in a wall where ancient conversations turn to hair and plaster: uncles calling from the sway of grammar and a cousin twice-removed reciting what she knows of saints and stars for no one but herself, resigned to live forever, on the promises she kept and paid for, in a cradle of thin air.
THE LISTENER
Luke 11: 6
It’s nightfall again on our hill. Headlamps and spots of gold in the middle distance; sculleries; pig sheds; a bedroom above a yard where someone is lulling an only child to sleep. I’ve been on this road since morning, the land gone from green through grey to a soft, damp bronze around me till, a mile or so from home, I come to the usual gloaming: an almost white against the almost black of gorse and may. Summer now: an older mode of sleep; and this, the running dream that follows stone and fence wire, digging in for what remains of snow-melt and the last good rain, the low road peopled with bone-white figures: not the living, in this aftermath of grass, and not the dead we mourn, in empty kirks or quiet kitchens, halfway through the day, but something like the absence of ourselves from our own lives, some other luck that would not lead to now. Along the coast, it’s still from field to field, the living asleep or awake in the quick of their beds, hard-wired with love and salt-sweet from the darkness, the long-dead blanking the roads and everything disloyal to the earth it came from, streaks and nubs of grief pooled in the dark and stitched with strictest pleasure at the core: that cunning relish for the irremediable. There’s nothing so final as want on a summer’s night, and few things so tender or sure as a knock at the door and nobody starting awake in the knit and tear of buried rooms, where mice breed in their millions, spilling loose through ruptured drains and root-bins, nightlong squeals that run beneath the stillness, like the stains of manganese and nickel in a wall where ancient conversations turn to hair and plaster: uncles calling from the sway of grammar and a cousin twice-removed reciting what she knows of saints and stars for no one but herself, resigned to live forever, on the promises she kept and paid for, in a cradle of thin air.
John Burnside is a professor in creative writing at St Andrews University. His most recent poetry collection is The Hunt in the Forest.
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