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Unwittingly
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 starling
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 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.
John
Burnside
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