A Meeting Of Parallel Lines

Unwittingly
John Burnside

I've visited the place
where thought begins:
pear trees suspended in sunlight, narrow shops,
alleys to nothing

but nettles
and broken wars;
and though it might look different
to you:

a seaside town, with steep roofs
the colour of oysters,
the corner of some junkyard with its glint
of coming rain,

though someone else again would recognise
the warm barn, the smell of milk,
the wintered cattle
shifting in the dark,

it's always the same lit space,
the one good measure:
Sometimes you'll wake in a chair
as the light is fading,

or stop on the way to work
as a current of starlings
turns on itself
and settles above the green,

and because what we learn in the dark
remains all our lives,
a noise like the sea, displacing the day's
pale knowledge,

you'll come to find yourself
in a glimmer of rainfall or frost,
the burnt smell of autumn,
a meeting of parallel lines,

and know you were someone else
for the longest time,
pretending you knew where you were, like a diffident tourist
lost on the one main square, and afraid to enquire.
_________

Sometime in the last months of 2006 I first discovered this John Burnside poem. It was late at night and I sat on my bed and wept, reading it over and over and over. Then, just as suddenly, I lost it again. I went backwards and forwards through my two thick poetry anthologies trying to find it but couldn't. Until the night before last, when, alone in the dark once again I opened a book at its exact page. Unwittingly.