Winter
Imagine I loved you still and nights like these
were visitations,
an endless Pentecost of lips and hands
and bodies resurrected in their beds,
not mine, or yours, but given, like snowfall.
Out in the dark, the woods are from a map
that someone has left unfinished: hand-colored signs
for birch, or deer, and nothing to explain
the new red of a kill, or how the silence
wells around a fallen sycamore;
but here, where we lie down in differing weather,
the night fades on our skins while we are dreaming,
and winter is the self, day after day,
ghosting a life from the nothing it knows by heart.
John Burnside was born in Dunfermline, Scotland. He attended Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, where he studied English and European languages. A computer analyst and software engineer for many years, Burnside began publishing poetry in the 1980s. He is a prolific writer of both poetry and prose, and his work frequently explores states of transformation, both personal and ecological. He has noted, “For me, poetry is both the account of, and the map by which I navigate my path … and, as such, is an ecological discipline of the richest and subtlest kind.” His collections of poetry include The Hoop (1988); Common Knowledge (1991), which won the Scottish Arts Council Book Award; Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; The Asylum Dance (2000), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize; The Light Trap (2002); The Good Neighbour (2005); Gift Songs (2007); The Hunt in the Forest (2009); and Black Cat Bone (2011), which won both the Forward Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2008, Burnside received the Cholmondeley Award.
Burnside’s prose works include the collection of short stories Burning Elvis (2000), several novels, and two memoirs. The Devil’s Footprints (2007) was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and A Summer of Drowning (2011) was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award. In his memoirs, A Lie About My Father (2006) and Waking Up in Toytown (2010), Burnside examines the long shadow cast by his abusive and alcoholic father and Burnside’s subsequent experiences with alcohol, drugs, and mental illness. A former writer-in-residence at Dundee University, Burnside currently teaches at the University of St. Andrews.