I stumbled across this delicious poem in the London Review of Books (which is my only source of news these days). Burnside is a Scottish writer who immerses himself in the same waters of deep ecology that I swim in. He (along with Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney) is one of three poets to win both the T.S. Eliot and the Forward Prize for poetry for one of his collections. This poem is a delicate puzzle. Someone waking? But is their waking into reality a false one? Perhaps the grace and blessing of these hypnopompic fragments are more real than reality?
Only the minor gods have ventured out
this morning: delicate
and silken, with a gift for mimicry,
they do not stoop to punish, or forgive,
though, sometimes, they are capable
of blessing.
I wake at dawn, but not to what I know
of Nineveh: a quinquereme
in abstract, certain hues
of cardamon, or tradescantia;
a siege of herons; razorfish in shoals;
cat snake and viper
tracked across the floor
or hidden in the feed
at lambing time;
till what I cannot recognise
as Silk Road
or an ounce of vie en rose,
is weaselled out of logic by a grace
as final as that fault line in the mind
where wilderness
comes slanting through the glint
of self-deceit and guile to claim its own.