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Overview
Before the songs I sang there were the songs they came from, patent shreds of Babel, and the secret
Nineveh of back rooms in the dark.
Hour after hour the night trains blundered through from towns so far away and innocent that everything I knew seemed fictional:
—from "Death Room Blues"
John Burnside's Black Cat Bone is full of poems of thwarted love and disappointment, raw desire, the stalking beast. One sequence tells of an obsessive lover coming to grief in echoes of the old murder ballads, and another longer poem describes a hunter losing himself in the woods while pursuing an unknown and possibly unknowable quarry. Black Cat Bone introduces American readers to one of the best poets writing across the Atlantic.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555977146 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 07/07/2015 |
| Pages: | 80 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.10(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Black Cat Bone
Poems
By John Burnside
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2011 John BurnsideAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-714-6
CHAPTER 1
THE FAIR CHASE
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,
plucking at shadows, purblind, afraid of our dogs,
and if, on occasion, I never quite saw the point,
I was always the first to arrive, with my father's gun,
bound to the old ways, lost in a hand-me-down greatcoat
and last among equals – flycatcher, dreamer, dolt,
companion to no one,
alone in a havoc of signs.
* * *
One year, the reservoir froze.
I walked out to the centre of the ice
and gazed down through a maze of gills and weed
to where a god I'd read about in books
– sweeter than pine, but stone-hard in his tomb –
lay waiting for a gaze to curse with knowledge.
The ice was clear as glass: I hunkered in
and dared him, from that unreflecting world,
to pull me through, in one bright flash of rage,
no crack, no sudden drop into the cold,
nothing to witness,
nothing to remember.
Minutes I waited; then the others came
and called me back, the dogs a swarm of noise
and worry, old men's
faces in a mist of their own breath
ashamed for my father's sake
and his father before him.
We carried on; I walked off to one side,
and halfway through the white of afternoon,
I slipped away, unwanted, or unnoticed,
taking a road less-travelled through fields and yards
of stunted brassicas and rotting tyres,
strangers in coveralls or leather aprons
stopping to watch as I passed: no hand raised in greeting,
no dog come out
to see me on my way.
That was a foreign country: snowdrifts, then sand,
blotted and kissed with yew-drupes
and windfall holly,
spotted owls hunting for beetles along the hedge,
smoke in the distance, nether roads,
passing bells.
I walked for hours, yet it was light as noon
when I came to a place I thought I had seen before
through a lull in the weather:
nothing to speak of,
a dirt track and sheep in the woods,
and that sense of a burial, under the moss and ruin,
but something was present a few steps into the treeline,
one of those creatures you find in a children's album,
a phantom thing, betrayed by smoke or rain,
or glimpsed through a gap in the fog, not quite discerned,
not quite discernible: a mouth, then eyes,
then nothing.
It lingered a while;
and then, as if it wanted me to play,
it shifted away through the trees – and I followed after.
Crashing through cover, ducking through sumac and maple
it leapt and ran, though never so fast or so far
that I couldn't keep pace
and when I paused for breath, it also paused
and stayed,
as if it wanted me to follow.
I never saw it clear, but it was there:
sometimes the brown of a roe-deer, sometimes
silver, like a flight of ptarmigan,
it shifted and flickered away
in the year's last light
and I came after, with my heavy gun,
trudging for miles
through meadows laced with rime,
working by scent
and instinct, finally
true to myself,
with the body and mind of a hunter
and, by the time I stepped into a glade
candy-striped with light and frosted grass,
I knew exactly what a man should do
in my position – lucky, singled out
by death and beauty for the blessèd kill,
assenting to the creature's dumb assent
to blood and darkness
and the life
beyond.
I took a bullet,
loaded it with care
and aimed with an intent that felt like love,
though I only knew love
by hearsay
and stubborn lack.
No sound, no movement; all the world was still
and not a creature in it
but ourselves,
me taking aim
and the animal stopped in its tracks,
waiting to see what would happen, unafraid,
a deer, I thought, and then I saw a fox,
and thinking I knew what it was
I pulled the trigger.
* * *
The old days were better for mourning;
better for tongue-tacked women
in ruined plaid
climbing a hillside
to gather the rainwashed bones
of what they had lost, that winter, to the cold,
and men in the prime of their lives,
with dwindled sight,
dreaming all night of that slow white out by the river
where, once or twice a year,
a girl would drown,
pledging her heart to a boy she had mostly imagined.
I remembered the flow country, then,
as the gunsmoke darkened:
I'd go there as a child on Sabbath days,
my father asleep in his church clothes, a fret of chickens
wandering back and forth
at the kitchen door,
a lull in the house and that emptiness high in the roof
as if someone had frittered away
in a summer wind.
I'd go out in my Sunday clothes and shoes
to the shimmer and dart
of sticklebacks threading the light
and search for something I could never name,
the blue of a smile, or the curious
pleasure of the doomed, as they go under;
and that was what I hurried out to see,
crossing the space
to where the beast went down
but all I could find when I got there, standing dismayed
in the stopped air of afternoon, with smoke on my lips
and my heart like a fettered thrush in the well of my throat,
all I could find was an inkwash of blear in the grass
like the fogged stain after a thaw,
and a ribbon of musk
threading away to the trees
and the distance beyond:
no body, no warmth, no aftermath, nothing to prize,
and the night coming down all at once,
like a weight at my shoulders,
settling in waves, till all I could see was my hands.
* * *
Everyone becomes
the thing he kills
– or so the children whisper, when they crush
a beetle or a cranefly in the dust,
feeling the snuff of it bleed
through the grain of their fingers;
I'd always thought of that
as superstition:
a wishful thinking, how the spirit moves
from one shape to the next
like breath,
or warmth,
infinite kinship, laid down in the blood
against the sway
of accident and weather;
yet out in the woods that night, as I dug myself in
to wait for the day, I felt it in my gut,
a gravity I'd never known before
dragging me down
so it seemed I would cleave to the earth,
the life I had taken
snug as a second skin.
I should have died, if not for the faint warmth
that held me there, unseeing, in a night
so utter, dawn
was like a miracle:
the trees emerging, piecemeal, from the cold,
a snowflake here, then there, then everything
arriving all at once, as I awoke
and, never having slept, began to walk.
I didn't know how far I was from home,
but nothing looked familiar
– not the woods
and not the road I found that afternoon,
dizzy from cold and hunger, hurrying on
through empty yards and desolate plantation,
nothing alive
as far as the eye could see,
only the white of the sky, like a wondering gaze
pursuing me from one field to the next,
from ditch to ditch,
from wall to broken wall.
I walked like that for days. The road led on
through spruce and lodgepole pine, then dipped away
to where a village lay, warmed in a crook
of hills that seemed familiar, suddenly:
a spill of lights and woodsmoke and a kirk
that made me think of something in a book
before I made it out. My dead were there
among the tilted stones;
I knew the market cross; I knew the spire;
but everything was strange, even the house
I came to at the far end of the lane
that passed the abattoir then crossed the brook
and finished at the unclipped cypress hedge
where no one lived next door,
though there were ghosts,
so frail, I only knew them by the sound
the wind made
when it worried at the shutters.
* * *
Nobody lives
here now, it's only
crows and bees
and every shift
and slant
is an event,
historic
in its void
of mud and wire.
Yet now and again
I have turned
in a falling shadow
and caught a glimpse
of something
at my back,
not heard, or seen,
but felt,
the way some distant
shiver in the barley registers,
before I can think to say
it was never there.
The hunters pass at daybreak, casting
curious looks at my door, but no one is here
to see, as they enter the mist
and disappear.
Nobody lives here now, not even me,
and yet the house is mine – a net of dreams
and phantoms
and that living animal
I followed through the woods: locked in my bones
and calling for the life it must have had
far in the green of the pines, and the white of the snow,
where I am hunting, hunting even now,
hearing that cry
and turning my head,
for an echo.
EVERAFTER
Bitte betrachten Sie mich als einen Traum!
Franz Kafka (remark to Adolf Brod)
ON THE FAIRYTALE ENDING
Begin with the fend-for-yourself
of all the loves you learned about
in story books;
fish-scale and fox-print
graven on the hand
forever
and a tiny hook-and-eye
unfastened in the sweetmeat of a heart
you thought would never grieve
or come undone.
May; and already
it's autumn: broken gold
and crimson in the medieval
beechwoods, where our shadows come and go,
no darker
than the figures in a book
of changes,
till they're hexed
and singled out
for something chill and slender in this world,
more sleight-of-hand
than sorrow or safekeeping.
DISAPPOINTMENT
Hope will predominate in every mind, till it has been suppressed by frequent
disappointments.
Samuel Johnson
I turn left out of the rain
at Kippo junction,
the windshield clearing to sky and a skim
of swallows over the road like the last few
pages of a 50s story book
where someone is walking home
to the everafter,
touched with the smell of the woods and the barberry
shadows where the boy he left behind
is standing up to his waist in a Quink-blue current,
a burr of water streaming through his hands
in silt italics, touch all hook-and-eye
beneath the swell, and fingers opened wide
to catch what slithers past – the powder-blue
and neon of a surer life than his,
scant as it is, and lost, in the gaze of others.
LOVED AND LOST
Give me a childhood again and I will live
as owls do, in the moss and curvature
of nightfall
– glimpsed,
but never really seen,
tracking the lane
to a house I have known from birth
through goldenrod
and alstr?meria;
while somewhere,
at the far edge of the day,
a pintailed duck
is calling to itself
across a lake,
the answer it receives
no more or less remote than we become
to one another,
mapped,
then set aside, till we admit
that love divulged is barely love at all:
only the slow decay of a second skin
concocted from the tinnitus of longing.
'A GARDEN INCLOSED IS MY SISTER, MY SPOUSE'
Matthew 22:14
Give me the medieval
lull of the sexless, praying behind a smile,
the eyes forever
slicked in candlelight
and all the world
in waiting: fields
of ammonite and bronze beneath the sway
of pasture, chalk
and charnel in the far room of a mind
that never sleeps, and will not let itself
be gathered to its god, no swarm and noir,
no slow extinction
filtered through the clouds,
but one thing, then another: green, then black;
hair in the lark's tongue, marrow in the pine.
THE BRIDE
And Samson said unto her, If they bind me with seven green withs
that were never dried, then shall I be weak, and be as another man.
Judges 16: 7
Whatever you should have been, you were never the one
who walked home from the small hours in a veil
of citrus and mariposa, dressed for another
ballo in maschera,
though someone who looks like you is the woman I spin
from willow and L'air du temps for the qualified world
to paralyse with echoes from the Book
of Judges, bowls
of watermark and blood set out to fade
beneath a yellow moon, while you remove
first one ring, then the next, your vows unlocked
and scattered in the dark, qual pium' al vento.
THE NIGHTINGALE
I
Under der linden
an der heide,
dâ unser zweier bette was,
dâ muget ir vinden
schône beide
gebrochen bluomen unde gras.
Vor dem walde in einem tal,
tandaradei,
schône sanc diu nahtegal.
Walther von der Vogelweide
If not the bridegroom or the Well-Beloved,
there's something here that chooses to remain
through centuries of thorn
and Lindenbaum,
to sing, not with the grace
of flesh surpassed,
but rain-deep, in the hollow of the stem,
where darkness folds and blisters into foreign
bodies, galls
and knots of keratin,
hunger and the thousand forms of lust
that quicken out of matter, fire-
and sap-stained, songs
unwinding from the throat
as breath spills out and comes, time and again,
to nothing – neither echo nor lament –
the buds we wreathed in silk, for wedding nights,
discarded now, a summer's lease of green
gone back beneath the frost while, nonetheless,
alone in the furthest wood, a night bird sings
and sings unheard,
where once we made our bed.
II
We lie where we made our bed, through years of rent
and kidskin, you
in indigo, the uncontested Queen
of soap-and-water, Low-Cal, mezzotint
epiphanies for Michaelmas
and Lent.
I come home late and vanish on the stairs;
you riffle through the Deaths and Marriages
for something more akin
to passion spent,
and when you leave me so,
unsatisfied,
I lumber on, by mutual consent,
whole flocks of shadow papering my skin
with scuffs and stains
and film clips of ascent.
NOTES TOWARDS AN ENDING
No more conversations.
No more wedlock.
No more vein of perfume in a scarf
I haven't worn for months, her voice come back
to haunt me, and the Hundertwasser sky
Magnificat to how a jilted heart
refuses what it once mistook for mercy.
It's never what we wanted, everafter;
we asked for something else, a lifelong Reich
of unexpected gifts and dolce vita,
peach-blossom smudging the glass and a seasoned
glimmer of the old days in this house
where, every night, we tried and failed to mend
that feathered thing we brought in from the yard,
after it came to grief on our picture window.
BLACK CAT BONE
E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare
Leopardi
NATIVITY
I come by chance. A train slows in the fog
and stands a while
and, when it leaves, there's one more soul aboard,
sung from the quiet, passing from car to car,
like the angel of God;
or, north of here, in some old lumber town,
the church clock stops, the wind dies in the trees
and I lie squalling in a slick of blood
and moonlight, seventh son
to some man's seventh son.
No gifts for me, no angel in the rafters
caught like a bird in the updraft from the stove,
only the words of an old curse scratched on the wall,
and the warmth of my mother
fading, as lights go out
in house after house, from here
to the edge of the world,
her slack mouth, then the darkness in her eyes
the first thing I see
when the midwife returns with a candle.
DEATH ROOM BLUES
Before the songs I sang there were the songs
they came from, patent shreds
of Babel, and the secret
Nineveh of back rooms in the dark.
Hour after hour
the night trains blundered through
from towns so far away and innocent
that everything I knew seemed fictional:
the squares of light beyond the paper mill
where wolves crept from the woods and found their way
to soft spots in the slick of memory;
the boy who killed his mother in her bed
for Jesus' sake.
Small wonder that I overcame my fear
of sweetness, when the only white I knew
was first snow at the margins of the world,
and any chore is sweeter, now,
than scripture, where the hand that smoothes away
each local asterisk of stripped desire
can seem so much like something I once lost
I'm half convinced that childhood never happened.
TRANSFIGURATION
I found a bobcat dying in the road
and stole the tattered remnant
of its soul.
I hunkered down and leaned into its last
sour breath, to drink it in:
I tasted blood and catpiss and a thread
of spirit in my throat, like gasoline.
I was the Alpha, driving in the rain
from town to town, unravelling the gospel.
I was the Omega, falling asleep at the wheel
and travelling on unharmed, through dreams of musk
and fur, no final wave
of son or husband buried in my hands,
my blood exchanged for fire, my thoughts for stone.
DOPE HEAD BLUES
I live in a separate country, white as the snow
on rooftops and stained glass
windows, the still of the woods
at furthest noon the only thought I have
and morphine skimming my mind, like the first
swallow in the courtyard, high and small
the voice, as if it came
from somewhere else;
and somewhere else, the house of rain and corn
that glimmers in the dark, while I ascend
to morning, warmth
and daylight, like the shirt a man
lies down in, after a long
unshrouding, seams
unstitching in my heart,
the taste of me the taste of something other.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Black Cat Bone by John Burnside. Copyright © 2011 John Burnside. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
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,