The Names

St Andrews: West Sands; September 2001 by John Burnside Today, as we flew the kites - the sand spinning off in ribbons along the beach and that gasoline smell from Leuchars gusting across the golf links; the tide far out and quail-grey in the distance; people jogging, or stopping to watch as the war planes cambered and turned in the morning light - today - with the news in my mind, and the muffled dread of what may come - I knelt down in the sand with Lucas, gathering shells and pebbles; finding evidence of life in all this spindrift: snail shells; shreds of razorfish; smudges of weed and flesh on tideworn stone. At times I think what makes us who we are is neither kinship nor our given states but something lost between the world we own and what we dream about behind the names on days like this, our lines raised in the wind our bodies fixed and anchored to the shore; and though we are confined by property what tethers us to gravity and light has most to do with distance and the shapes we find in water, reading from the book of silt and tide: the rose or petrol blue of jellyfish and sea anemone combining with a child's first nakedness. Sometimes I am dizzy with the fear of losing everything - the sea, the sky, all living creatures, forests, estuaries: we trade so much to know the virtual we scarcely register the drift and tug of other bodies, scarcely apprehend the moment as it happens: shifts of light and weather, and the quiet, local forms of history: the fish lodged in the tide beyond the sands; the long insomnia of ornamental carp in public parks captive and bright, and hung in their own slow-burning, transitive gold; jamjars of spawn and sticklebacks, or goldfish carried home from fairgrounds to the hum of radio; but this is the problem: how to be alive in all this gazed-upon and cherished world and do no harm: a toddler on a beach sifting wood and dried weed from the sand and puzzled by the pattern on a shell, his parents on the dune slacks with a kite plugged into the sky, all nerve and line: patient; afraid; but still, through everything, attentive to the irredeemable. © John Burnside 2001

The House on the Hill They are all gone away, The house is shut and still, There is nothing more to say Through broken walls and gray The winds blow bleak and shrill; They are all gone away. Nor is there one today To speak them good or ill: There is nothing more to say. Why is it then we stray Around that shrunken sill? They are all gone away. And our poor fancy-play For them is wasted skill: There is nothing more to say. There is ruin and decay In the House on the Hill: They are all gone away, There is nothing more to say. - Edwin Arlington Robinson Curse May breath for a dead moment cease as jerking your head upward you hear as if in slow motion floor collapse evenly upon floor as one hundred and ten floors descend upon you. May what you have made descend upon you. May the listening ears of your victims their eyes their breath enter you, and eat like acid the bubble of rectitude that allowed you breath. May their breath now, in eternity, be your breath. * Now, as you wished, you cannot for us not be. May this be your single profit. Of your rectitude at last disenthralled, you seek the dead. Each time you enter them they spit you out. The dead find you are not food. Out of the great secret of morals, the imagination to enter the skin of another, what I have made is a curse. - Frank Bidart September 11 (after George Herbert) Understanding something isn't prayer, necessarily. Cinnamon croissants, hot pretzels speared under glass, cafe latte behind hostility's headlines. God in the details: man well-dressed, reversed thunder from a milky-breathed baby. Engines pitted against time, take-off code from the air traffic control tower, radar plumbing the atmosphere. Slumped in blue jean bell-bottoms, teens nodding to heavy metal on ear phones. Hard not to hear. Journey of strangers locked in a tube. Annals of the absurd faithful, prepared to meet the stars in a biff of pressured air. Softness of cruising, bliss of landing, love waiting in the wings, the cockpit. In ordinary hearts, a slivered wish. Muted joy at unfastening seatbelts. Paraphrased as relief. Flying from ice pole to desert to birders' paradise in privileged pilgrimage, the best cuts of wool. Storing luggage in the overheads, not knowing the six days world would be transposed in one hour. - Teresa Cader