By Herodsfoot
Out in the dark, the tawny owls are hunting,
moving away from this house at the edge of the woods
where what we know of life is mostly owls
and night rain in the trees, a steady fuzz
we think of as accomplished,
given in marriage and taking it in turn
to go down in the dark to where the kitchen
harbours the lingering quiet we sometimes hear
as rats’ feet in the larder, seeping pipes,
the murmur of decay in lath and wires,
and surely we look for something in the dust
that settles on the saucerful of milk
we leave out for an imp we’ve never quite
dismissed, the way we set aside the god
of childhood, and the ghost of Santa Claus,
sitting at three a.m. with a mug of tea
and the newspapers spread out on the floor, like shipping charts,
we take it in turn, like dreamers, to understand
the one thing we never admit in the daylight hours,
reading from what we can – a fall of soot,
the cat hairs in a bowl, some random stain –
that locked sense of robin’s egg blue
at the back of a life
that never quite lost its place
in the given script
but wanted, more than anything, to rise
and go out in the dark, to where the owls
were shifting aside, unlocked from the visible world,
and the rain in the trees
was a room at the end of the mind
where what we love goes on, uninterrupted.
John Burnside
