by John Burnside
 

(Des Knaben Wunderhorn)

I SHEKINAH

I've heard how the trawlermen harvest
quivering, sexless fish
from the ache of the sea;
how they stand on the lighted decks and hold
the clouded bodies,
watching the absence form in those buttoned eyes
and thinking of their children, home in bed,
their songless wives, made strange by years of dreaming.
I've heard that seal-folk drift in from the haar
through open doors,
the cold that strokes your lips while I am gone,
probing your sleep and stealing a little warmth
to mimic love
- so, driving back, it's always a surprise
that coming home is only to the given:
old gardens in Lochgelly, thick with privet;
still-pools of oil and silt at Pittenweem;
lights on the Isle of May; the low woods
filling with salted rain beyond Markinch.
It's always a surprise: the stink of neeps;
the malt-spills of autumn fields, where floodlit tractors
labour and churn;
the last few miles of wind and scudding clouds,
or starlit silence, hung around the house,
as vivid as the angel who attends
all marriages.
Its shimmer on our bed
is subtle, but it keeps us to itself,
learning the make-believe of granted love,
and this is all we know, an angel's gift:
that weddings are imagined, love's contrived
while each of us has one more tale to tell,
the way you feel the turning of the tide
beneath the house, or somewhere in the roof,
or how I sometimes linger on the stairs,
listening for nothing, unconvinced,
less husband than accomplice to the dark,
beguiled by the pull of the moon
and the leylines of herring.

II HEIMWEH

Remembering the story of a man
who left the village one bright afternoon,
wandering out in his shirt-sleeves and never returning,
I walk in this blur of heat to the harbour wall,
and sit with my hands in my pockets, gazing back
at painted houses, shopfronts, narrow roofs,
people about their business, neighbours, tourists,
the gaunt men loading boats with lobster creels,
women in hats and coats, despite the sun,
walking to church and gossip.
It seems too small, too thoroughly contained,
the quiet affliction of home and its small adjustments,
dogs in the backstreets, barking at every noise,
tidy gardens, crammed with bedding plants.
I turn to the grey of the sea and the further shore:
the thought of distance, endless navigation,
and wonder where he went, that quiet husband,
leaving his keys, his money,
his snow-blind life. It's strange how the ones who vanish
seem weightless and clean, as if they have stepped away
to the near-angelic.
The clock strikes four. On the sea wall, the boys from ñthe village
are stripped to the waist and plunging in random pairs
to the glass-smooth water;
they drop feet first, or curl their small, hard bodies to a ball
and disappear for minutes in the blue.
It's hard not to think this moment is all they desire,
the best ones stay down longest, till their friends
grow anxious, then they re-emerge
like cormorants, some yards from where they dived,
renewing their pact with the air, then swimming back
to start again. It's endlessly repeatable, their private game,
exclusive, pointless, wholly improvised.
I watch them for a while, then turn for home,
made tentative, half-waiting for the day
I lock my door for good, and leave behind
the smell of fish and grain, your silent fear,
our difficult and unrelenting love.

III AFTER THE STORM

The wind has sealed our house with a thin
layer of dust;
study the landing windows and you'll find
tiny particles of leaf and shell,
insect bodies, crystals of salt and mica.
The radio's playing; you've put the kettle on
and, standing in your winter coat and gloves,
you listen to that song you've always liked,
the one about love.
Somewhere outside, in the gradually stilling world,
a bus has stalled, the driver
turning the engine, over and over again,
and someone's dog is barking at the noise,
guarding its phantom realm of bricks and weeds.
All over Fife, the roads
are blocked with fallen trees and stranded cars,
the tide keeps washing wreckage to the shore,
splints of timber, fishnets, broken toys.
This wind has blown for days across the fields,
so now the silence feels unnatural,
as if the storm is what we really need,
the sound of it, its small, forensic pleasures,
ribbons of silt or birchseed in the hall,
a feather on the bedroom windowsill,
and what we might discover of ourselves
and one another, as the night begins.
So much that moves around us in the dark
is ours: the smallest shiver in the hedge
a knowledge we have waited years to learn,
and something come inside, in that one
moment, when you hold the door ajar,
more than a gust of rain, more than the wind,
more than the Halloween ghosts we might imagine.
Those animals that figure on the walls,
those creatures we imagine on the stairs
are real, and we must give them shapes and names,
feed them with blood and salt, fix them a bed,
make shift, make good, allow them this possession.

IV BORDERS

A mile inland, foxes begin.
We see them working the fields
like patient farmers,
hunting for rabbits and voles
behind the dunes,
aware of us as strange, peripheral,
almost unreal:
By now we belong
to the sea,
to lights on the firth and the sifting
of water and sand.
Our dreams are all of fish we cannot name,
slivers of ice or metal in the nets,
mackerel shedding their scales and becoming
children, like the creatures who appear
when we sprinkle a handful of salt
on a dying fire,
figments of longing,
ghosts from the shriven past.
A mile inland, the guard-dogs and wintered cattle
know nothing of tides;
people go out at dawn, to taste the earth
that clings to their walls and their houses,
pinning them to transience and loss,
gaps in the kirkyard, the lifelong remoteness of stars.
Out here, it seems
the harbour never changes:
cormorants; gulls; the same boats moored by the wall,
Gemini, Sapphire, Reaper, Lucky Strike.
Nothing's impermanent here, where nothing
is ever untouched by the wind, or the salted rain;
though our dreams can recur for weeks, they will still remain
unknowable, repeated in the dark
as everything's repeated: love; regret;
the lights across the water, drawing in
like friendly animals we might have known
from somewhere else, some childhood we have lost
and turn to one another to renew
with questions, dares, evasions, hunted looks.

V ALCHEMY

We have to drive the length of Fife to work,
moving from sunlight to frost, from brightness to fog,
each fence post and wind-thrawn tree
familiar as a road-sign
or a steeple.
This is the journey we'll make
all winter,
snow on the roofs, the street trees dusted with salt
like Nativity angels;
the land around us silent as a trap;
roads washed with light, peewits and crows in the fields,
the schoolhouse clock suspended in mid-air,
white-faced, exact,
like something achieved,
then forgotten.
This is the winter we'll learn
again and again,
like alchemy, not turning lead to gold, but finding
ways to persist, to go on for no good reason,
choosing our landmarks, finding the best way home.
Meanwhile, the road is clear: the gardens and hedges
glitter with dew;
yewberries melt and leave their fleshly stains
on cinder paths and flagstones in the park;
and here, in the lane, behind the Catholic church,
a litter of small, gold apples, newly-fallen,
wet with thawglass
after last night's frost
- crab-apples, worthless and bright
in the morning sun,
like something that might have been left behind
to signal a transmutation.
We'll spend a lifetime
finding useless gold,
and learning how to read it as a sign:
the angel we've imagined in our path,
a stain on the daylight, as close as I am to you,
closer by far, and far more dangerous.

VI THE HOUSE BY THE SEA

The light is angelic and black,
the waves lap the harbour wall
like a form of laughter,
salt-laughter, drawn from the depths,
like the names of fishes.
At night, on the swaying deck, in the singing wind,
the trawlerman will find himself alone,
forgetting his thoughts, aware of the moving dark,
and listening to something he can hear,
he knows must be imagined.
When he turns
to call out to his neighbour, no one's there;
but something he saw through the rain, a face, a wing,
will haunt him for years,
the way it shone like home,
so far at sea.
Yet home belongs at sea: that tang of salt,
that smell of flesh and rain
- what little we know
of houses, we have learned
from sirens: how to walk our new-made lawns,
singing the names of flowers like a spell
to make them true,
cornflower, lily, sea-holly, rhododendron,
roses for scent and colour, yew for its fruits,
tubers and pistils, seed-pods and sacs of nectar.
What little we know of houses, we achieve
against the wind, the motion of the tides,
the pebbles and pockmarked stones we bring indoors
at random, for no good reason, and perhaps
against our wills.
The day is angelic; black; but we have fashioned
circles of grey against the coming light,
and sit at home, pretending to be safe,
aware of the siren calling in the bay,
the voice that only enters through the gaps
we leave in this invention of a life,
but enters still, to part us from ourselves
and one another: creatures from the sea
who know how long before the tide returns.

VII SIGNS

I want to plant the garden with forsythia;
not for its busy flowers, the strident
yellows fading to clusters
of watered cream,
and not for the coarse-haired leaves
that follow, like a clumsy afterthought;
it's just that I'd have a sign
to augur spring,
to come in from the garden, where I've stood
hanging the wash, or watching the sky for rain
and tell you:
the forsythia's in bloom.
I want to plant the beds with chionodoxa,
narcissus poeticus, iris reticulata,
lacecap hydrangeas, peonies, meconopsis,
so nothing will be missed: the smallest change,
blossom-break, first-fruit, leaf-fall,
coming snow.
I want to know when every lily blooms,
to read our garden like a favourite book
and find you, as you step in from the heat,
clouded with pollen, scented with grain and sap;
to know you as the locals know
the names of fields and long-abandoned wells,
gossip from way back,
the best place for sloes, or apples.
I want to step out at night, when you're asleep
and sit beside the pool, watching the fish:
stars on the water, the orange carp hanging in pairs
as if they meant to mirror one another,
making a game of likeness, matching
shadow with shadow; the patterns of colour and scale
echoed in the water as they glide,
so separate, so bright within their world,
plugged into one tight current of tension and sound,
and only a notion of difference by which
to flicker apart, and tell themselves
one from another.

VIII BEHOLDING

As morning moves in from the firth
I'm sitting up awake, a mug of tea
fogging the window, the bones of my hands and face
shot with insomnia's delicate, lukewarm needles.
You're still asleep. Your hair is the colour of whey
and your hand on the pillow is clenched, like a baby's fist
on a figment of heat, or whatever you've clutched in a dream,
and I suddenly want to ask
your forgiveness, for something deliberately
cruel in the way I see, in the way
all seeing could become: too hard, too clear,
refusing to find something more than the cool of morning.
It's Halloween; if only because the dead
will come all afternoon to walk the streets
in faded hats and 1950s coats,
or gather by the harbour after dark
watching for lights beyond the lights we know,
their eyes like the eyes of seals, their faces
meltwater blue, as if they had surfaced through ice,
I want to go outside and gather
buckets of rain-washed apples, scabs of leaf,
a handful of broken coal, or a yellowed stump
of spindlewood, to feed the kitchen fire,
then watch, as it dwindles to ash
by late afternoon;
or wander all day in the kirkyard, reading the names
on strangers' graves: their plots laid side by side
with those they loved and hated, those they feared;
friends who betrayed them; children who watched them die.
It's what they meant by coming to this place
and choosing to remain, though decades fastened their hands
to kindling and wire, and the dampness that seeped through the walls
all winter long.
Now, suddenly, you're talking in your sleep,
your face on the pillow like one of those paper masks
we used to make in school, for Halloween,
talking to someone you've dreamed, while your white hands
fasten on something fragile or easily lost,
a strand of hair, a ring, a stranger's arm,
the promise you have to remember, that brings us home.