Archive > Vol. 19 NO 2

John Burnside

Preparations for the True Apocalypse

It is the true Apocalypse this, when the “Open Secret” becomes revealed to a man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine – with an ear for the “Ewigen Melodien” which pipe in the winds round us, and utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things: not to be written down by gamut-machinery; but which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down.

                —Thomas Carlyle, letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 13th February 1837

We have come to the last bohème
of being here, and still no guarantee
of other bodies, pressing through the fog

to meet us, for those summertimes in trust
where nothing comes
of nothing.

Harvest, at last.
Or else, an early frost;
no alchemy so tender as the nub

of ruin, where the first plums start to fall
in long-abandoned orchards, stray
anemones and houseleeks in the weeds,

a minaret
of wasps
between the trees.

Imagine how it looks
when we are gone,
the other presences so well-achieved

 they want for nothing, goldcrest in the pines,
the larger fauna, ponies
out to grass;

and everything that might have been undone
resuming, in the gaps we left behind:
wave after wave of brightness on the land:

buckthorn and nightshade, engulfing the last cracked wall,
black as the earth
in which our dreams are laid.