Cover
About the Author
Also by John Burnside
Title Page
Epigraph
Swimming in the flood
Science
A distant cousin
Wrong
A folk story
The Light Institute
Home movie
Hypothesis
Ascension Day
A miracle on market day
The sexton’s daughter
Catch-kiss
Lack of evidence
Schadenfreude
An ordered world
A swimming lesson
In the psychiatric hospital
Cathy
A private life
Summer
A stolen child
Burning a woman
Searching for lambs
Natalie
The old gods
Barren
September
The rainbow
Parousia
Acknowledgements
Copyright
John Burnside has published eleven previous collections of poetry, including The Asylum Dance, which won the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award, and six works of fiction – most recently the novel, A Summer of Drowning, which came out this year. He has also written two books of memoirs, A Lie About My Father and Waking Up In Toytown.
ALSO BY JOHN BURNSIDE
The hoop
Common Knowledge
Feast Days
The Myth of the Twin
Lava quod est sordidum,
Riga quod est aridum,
Sana quod est saucium.
Stephen Langton
Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto.
Terence
Later he must have watched
the newsreel,
his village erased by water: farmsteads and churches
breaking and floating away
as if by design;
bloated cattle, lumber, bales of straw,
turning in local whirlpools; the camera
panning across the surface, finding the odd
rooftop or skeletal tree,
or homing in to focus on a child’s
shock-headed doll.
Under it all, his house would be standing intact,
the roses and lime trees, the windows,
the baby grand.
He saw it through the water when he dreamed
and, waking at night, he remembered the rescue boat,
the chickens at the prow, his neighbour’s pig,
the woman beside him, clutching a silver frame,
her face dislodged, reduced to a puzzle of bone
and atmosphere, the tremors on her skin
wayward and dark, like shadows crossing a field
of clouded grain.
Later, he would see her on the screen,
trying to smile, as they lifted her on to the dock,
and he’d notice the frame again, baroque and absurd,
and empty, like the faces of the drowned.
Sound waves were never explained
to my satisfaction,
how they could travel through water, lacing the pool
with muffled voices,
or streaming away from the deep end, to fledge the walls
with faint harmonics, lapping semitones.
On Thursdays I went from school
to the public baths
and waited for the body I desired:
the swallow dive, the underwater glide,
the surface tension
of a second skin.
In physics I watched a light beam shatter and heal,
bleeding to crimson and blue in a prism of glass,
and wondered if a soul could change like that,
my father’s shadow filtered through the lens
and disappearing, leaving something clean
and weighted, like the swimmer’s earned fatigue,
rhythmic and steady,
a sine wave of grace and attunement.
I thought I could track you down
to one of those straw-covered huts
in Pittencrieff Park:
hairless and cicatriced, you would crouch in the rain,
gone native in the drip of rhododendrons.
Or, naked as bats in flight, we would meet in the ferns,
merging, then wheeling away
to the family outing:
my mother under her headscarf, smudged with mascara,
lining the others in rows for the Instamatic.
I thought I would find you submerged
in a hidden pool,
breathing through water, waiting to capture my soul,
the way our pictures only caught the forced
rehearsal of a smile, a milk-toothed grin,
the hint of a suspicion in our eyes
that someone was at home, while we were gone,
misting the windows, veiling the mirrors with stour.
A swallowed nail. A trick with razor blades.
Round the allotments, four in the afternoon,
October: I was gouging out a face,
a jack-a-lantern’s grin of candlelight,
the jagged mouth, the nose, the death’s-head eyes,