Two Poems
John Burnside, 29 October 1998
“... Taxonomy Carolus Linnaeus (1707-78) Weeks out of school: in rainstorms and grandmothers’ cupboards, bear-dark in the corners, filigrees of lacewing and silt; the birds we saw in books: merganser, stork; trees from botanic gardens printed on air; the words in our minds like games that would never be finished: names for moments at sea; or how a skin is altered by a history of shade: the smallest shift enough to fix a thing or make it new: soft or more evenly mottled; bearing scars and hairless; or defined for centuries by how it seemed emerging from the earth: fragile dicotyledon smudged with ash, not sixty feet of constituted rain ... ”