till everything is choir

Here's yet another Christmas-voucher purchase - the pictured 2014 John Burnside collection ...

... I particularly like the opening verse:


Hall of Mirrors, 1964

Quam angusta innocentia est,
ad legem bonum esse.
                                         Seneca

It wasn’t a fairground so much;
just an acre of clay on old man Potter’s land
where someone had set up shop
to amuse the locals,

mayweed and trampled grass beneath our feet,
the perfumes that passed for summer
in towns like ours
touched, now, with the smell of candy floss

and diesel, and the early evening dusk
made eerie by those strings of famille-verte
and powdered-citrus light-bulbs round the stalls
where goldfish in their hundreds probed the walls

of fishtanks for the missing scent
of river.
That day, my mother wore her rose-print
sundress, antique-green

and crimson in the off-white
fabric, some new flora growing wild
in infinite reflection, while I turned
and turned, and couldn’t find myself until

she picked me out: a squat
intruder in the garden she had made,
blearfaced and discontent, more beast than boy,
more fiend than beast.

That wasn’t me, of course; I knew as much;
and yet I knew the creature I had seen
and, when I turned again and saw him
gazing back at me, ad infinitum,

I knew him better: baby-faced
pariah; little
criminal, with nothing to confess
but narrow innocence

and bad intentions.
The backrooms of the heart are Babylon
incarnate, miles of verdigris and tallow and the cries
of hunting birds, unhooded for a kill

that never comes.
I saw that, when I saw this otherself
suspended in its caul of tortured glass,
and while I tried pretending not to see, my mind

a held breath in a house I’d got by heart
from being good according to a law
I couldn’t comprehend, I saw
– and I believed my mother saw –

if only for a moment, what I was
beyond the child she loved, the male
homunculus she’d hoped I’d never find
to make me like my father, lost

and hungry, and another mouth to feed
that never quit its ravening.
A moment passed;
I was convinced she’d seen,

but when I turned to look, her face was all
reflection, printed roses and a blear
of Eden from that distance in the glass,
where anything can blossom, Judas tree and tree

of knowledge, serpents gnawing at the roots, the life
perpetual, that’s never ours alone,
including us, till everything
is choir.

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John Burnside (1955 - )

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