by John Burnside
 

I ECHO PIT ROAD

All afternoon the house has filled with bees:
drifting between the mirrors, brushing the glass
with creosote, they magnetise the air
till I can feel the dead against my skin,
the standstill of accomplished memory.
At dusk I see my father in the yard:
drained of regret, in a raincoat and leather gloves,
he sets his ladder to the cherry tree
and climbs unsteadily to where
a little owl is tangled in the nets.
Now he is working slowly, to cut it free:
holding the wings in his fist while he tugs it loose,
he pitches the bird aside and turns his face,
awkward and well-intentioned, self-betrayed,
revealing the gap in his hands
to the gathering darkness.

II GHOST

Your sister called to talk while we were out.
I played the tape; that rancour in her voice
cut like a knife.
No ghosts on Barton Road:
beyond the edge of town, amongst the trees
our porch light glimmers, blue as paraffin;
the deer come through at dusk; the dogs run wild;
passing foxes rummage in the bins
for pig-bones and fat.
We sit up late, inventing dialogue.
I understand too well your fear of touch,
the hunger you displace with memories,
the badger in the soul, the totem beast
that digs beneath the house, kicks up a stink,
comes to our bed in the moonlight, to plead contrition.

III SCAVENGER

It's autumn all afternoon:
the light between dog and wolf,
a cold rain fuzzing the trees
on Barton Road. I'm listening;
if anything exists besides ourselves
I'll hear it on the air:
the creak of water stalling in the pipes,
a fall of soot, the first milk of decay
filming the bones of mice beneath the stairs
- a softer voice than any I'd imagine,
giving itself away
in the hush of dusk.

You won't allow cats in the house,
and even our quietest moments are immune
to badgers and hunting owls,
though somewhere along this street, a sleeping woman
drifts in a sulphurous tide of flying ants,
and lightning spirits brush the holly trees
at Gosden, where the old men lie awake,
fishing for catfish and dace
in a river of static.
So much of flesh is grass, you find yourself
in ramsons and the smell of bittercress,
in mullein and foxgloves, lighting the summer nights,
and golden iris hanging in the porch
to keep us safe. You bury stones and feathers in a jar
to drive all thought of evil from the door,

while I construct this tunnel in the dark:
cockchafers; worms; a cobweb of blood on my tongue;
and all the time I long for transformation,

subsisting in the shadow of the house:
containing, like a cyst, my father's soul,
his cryptic love, his taste for carrion.

IV ROAD KILL

On the way home, I hit
a rabbit or a fox-cub
in the dark.
The snapped bone echoed for miles
in the taut suspension:
ripples of tooth and nail
in the meat of my spine.
I'm frightened now:
a spirit haunts my dreams,
I wake before dawn
and her peeled face
rises to meet me.
You never see. You fade and reappear
like Lazarus:
sometimes I find bright jars
of oxblood, or flowers of sulphur,
buried in the cupboard understairs;
sometimes I find you sleeping in the day,
accepting the shape of the dead
like you want it to happen.

V PENTIMENT

Lately, I feel an echo in my hands,
an awkwardness he never failed to mask,
a lack of grace. All I have learned
I want to learn again:
fumbling in the cold to tie a line;
letting the fish slide free
in the fleeting water.
This is the art of erasure, my father's craft:
working towards inevitable blanks
where children, or a woman's face had been;
recovering the forms he painted out:
a lover's shadow hidden in a vase,
a bowl of fruit, a blaze of drapery
- and memory is all accomplishment:
in every flaw, admission of desire,
the unexpected error of inclusion.

VI GYR

The girl I remember
is holding a jessed and hooded
falcon at the centre of her eye:
shy as a Berber, she watches as the flash-bulb
etches out this portion of her soul.

Though spirit may be all
the camera ignores
- motion and change, the simmer of recognition,
certainly, potential, self-deceit -
she can't avoid some loss of gravity.

Now she is giddy, wanting her father's hand:
his knotted bones, his pigeon-coloured veins;
now I remember nothing but the grip
of talons, and the weight I cannot lose,
the falcon turning, borrowed from the air,
my unexpected kinship with its hunger.

VII MANDRAKE

White ants are eating his face,
stripping the shape from the bone
in the dreaming river,
gnawing away the fingernails and hair,
devouring the scourged remains,
the crown of thorns.
Now he will rise again and wander home:
drawn from the earth, he takes on human form,
he peels me from the air, wraps me in blood,
steps into my flesh and walks away.
I know this ghost. It's only a drift of smoke
in the summer darkness,
fox-piss lining the hedges, road-kills and dew.
Something from nowhere: the wet shirt peeled from my back
on the first day of school;
the fear of manhood; cloakroom mysteries;
the pit cage where the colliers went down
to miles of gas; the silence in the barn,
that blood-warmth I couldn't explain
in the lath and plaster.
Sleeping, I meet the knacker's bloodless stare,
his salty fingers rolling back my tongue,
probing the milk-teeth,
feathering the palate.
I've watched him skin a carcass in the yard:
skilful and unrepentant, drenched in blood,
he scattered the wet remains across the earth
and entered them, becoming what he killed.
Once I reached in and touched the smoking lungs,
the barrel of the ribs, the cooling heart.
Now I go out at dawn and walk the meadows,
searching for the image of a fox,
a rat, a weasel - anything but man.
My fingers are wrapped in leaf-mould
and stagnant mud,
chained to my father, rooted in his hands,
remembering his body as he comes
through quicklime and spawn to touch me in the dream
and whisper, through the resurrected mask,
give everything you have to feed this longing.

VIII LEAVING

What animals are these, come from the fields,
shifting from form to form
in our clouded garden?

I watch till they become invisible
then reappear an arm's length further on:
shy; evasive; grounded in the shadows.

What little I know of houses
I leave behind:
the stubborn light, the scents that never fade,

asparagus and old machinery
pinning your memory down
in the empty kitchen;

the brand of soap you liked, the after-shave,
folding you into the dust
of the upper rooms.

Those animals return with every flitting:
strangers arrive and find them in the porch
decaying slowly, lingering for days,

or lost between the floorboards and the wall:
a knot of hair;
an aftermath of feathers.