BLACK CAT BONE
John Burnside
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446499405
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Jonathan Cape 2011
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Copyright © John Burnside 2011
John Burnside has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Jonathan Cape
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780224093859
Cover
Also by John Burnside
Title Page
Dedication
The Fair Chase
Everafter
On the Fairytale Ending
Disappointment
Loved and Lost
‘A Garden Inclosed Is My Sister, My Spouse’
The Bride
The Nightingale
Notes Towards an Ending
Black Cat Bone
Nativity
Death Room Blues
Transfiguration
Dope Head Blues
Hurts Me Too
Oh No, Not My Baby
Moon Going Down
Day of the Dead
Down by the River
A Game of Marbles
Creaturely
Bird Nest Bound
Faith
Faith
Hearsay
Hyena
Neoclassical
Amnesia
The Listener
Pieter Brueghel: Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap, 1565
Community Pool
Weather Report
Insomnia in Southern Illinois
The Soul as Thought Experiment
Late Show
From the Chinese
Notes & Acknowledgements
Copyright
for David Miller
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FICTION
The Dumb House
The Mercy Boys
Burning Elvis
The Locust Room
Living Nowhere
The Devil’s Footprints
Glister
POETRY
The hoop
Common Knowledge
Feast Days
The Myth of the Twin
Swimming in the Flood
A Normal Skin
The Asylum Dance
The Light Trap
The Good Neighbour
Selected Poems
Gift Songs
The Hunt in the Forest
NON-FICTION
A Lie About My Father
Waking Up in Toytown
De torrente in via bibet;
propterea exaltabit caput
Psalm 109
What we were after there, in the horn and vellum
shadows of the wood behind our house,
I never knew.
At times, it felt like bliss, at times
a run of musk and terror, gone to ground
in broken wisps of ceresin and chrism,
but now and then, the beast was almost there,
glimpsed through the trees,
or lifting its head from a stream
to make us out:
a coarseness on the wind
and brittle voices sifted from the morning.
We tracked the scent through barley fields and hollows,
we followed it into the spinney
with billhooks and sickles,
but nothing was ever there, save the codling moon
and, far in the meadows,
the one field of nothing but grasses
where something had lain,
in a fetor of blood-warmth and pollen,
before it moved on.
Still, we continued;
when one man sickened and died,
another would take his place in the wandering column,
blacksmiths and lawyers, orchardmen,
butchers in waiting,
lost in the fog, or hallooing after the pack,
and all of them friends of my father’s; though, needless to say,
in a country like this, the dead have more friends
than the living.
We were the men you saw
on a winter’s morning:
cumbersome bodies, shrouded in gunsmoke and cyan,
we went out every day, in every season,
falconers, rat catchers, deerstalkers, whippers-in,