John Burnside Poems

My whole world is all you refuse:
a black light, angelic and cold
on the path to the orchard,
fox-runs and clouded lanes and the glitter of webbing,
...

As cats bring their smiling
mouse-kills and hypnotised birds,
slinking home under the light
of a summer's morning
...

It’s moments like this
when the barman goes through the back
and leaves me alone
...

If summer is conversation,
then winter is thought;
or so it seems tonight: rain in the trees
and, halfway between our house
...

To prove that nothing
really disappears
and nothing comes of nothing,
days like these
...

I dream of the silence
the day before Adam came
to name the animals,
...

No one invents an absence:
Cadmium yellow, duckweed, the capercaillie
- see how the hand we would name restrains itself
till all our stories end in monochrome;
...

It never switches off; even asleep
We listen in to gravity itself.
Crossing a field is one long exercise
in equilibrium - a player’s grace -
...

If the house in a dream
Is how I imagine myself:
room after room
of furniture no one could use;
...

Nothing is as it was
in childhood, when we had to learn the names
of objects and colours,
...