Anniversary
What I believe in, now,
is woodwork and sea-grass
the blond light on country roads and occasional
glimpses of the smaller birds of prey;
or lying awake at night, with a lamp still lit
in one of the lower rooms, to feel the darkness
gather like a fleece
above the stairs,
as if the house would happily reveal
its ghosts: umbrellas dripping in the hall
and rain tracked in from forty years ago
to other mirrors, other kitchen chairs.
Old conversations echo in our hands
and voices, all our lives
continuous and ready to be told
in words and gestures: unrecorded love
and what we take for love, on nights like this,
the cellar locked, the albums put away,
and some blind creature circling in the roof,
its throat plucked clean, its feathers smudged with clay.
John Burnside
