John Burnside (born March 19, 1955) is a Scottish writer.
He is one of only two poets (the other being Sean O’Brien) to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book (Black Cat Bone).
APPROACHING SIXTY
John Burnside
Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
W. B. Yeats
In the Central Café
in Innsbruck,
a girl in a dark-blue dress
unlooses her hair from its clasp
so it falls to her waist,
then sits with her friends
to coffee and Sachertorte,
turning her head just once
to look at me,
and all the while winding her hair
in knots and raising it high
so the nape of her neck
is visible, slender and pale
for moments, before the spill
of light and russet
falls down to her waist: falls
back down to her waist across the dark-blue
fabric, while I try hard not to stare:
a man growing old, with a touch
of sciatica, mild
arthritis
and hypertension,
striving to seem a comfortable kind
of scarecrow, not so blinded by desire
as makes the heart a nest of rag and bone,
and still, if she could see it,
not quite foul,
just one of those
who knows what beauty is
and lingers on the ache,
to stay alive.
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SEPTEMBER EVENING: DEER AT BIG BASIN
John Burnside
When they talk about angels in books
I think what they mean is this sudden
arrival: this gift of an alien country
we guessed all along,
and how these deer are moving in the dark,
bound to the silence, finding our scent in their way
and making us strange, making us all that we are
in the fall of the light,
as if we had entered the myth
of one who is risen, and one who is left behind
in the gap that remains,
a story that gives us the questions we wanted to ask,
and a sense of our presence as creatures,
about to be touched.
======
WILD
John Burnside
Today,
on our journey home,
we saw
a buzzard
making a kill
on the roadside verge.
It glided across
our windscreen
and hunkered down
on something –
we couldn’t see
what it was – as the wings
folded around
what Lucas called
‘the prey’.
He wanted to know
if buzzards took children,
or cats;
then,
as we slowed to look,
he chose to admire
the plumage
and the fierce light
of its eye.