John Burnside
Heatwave
Heatwave
After it rained, the back roads gusted with steam,
and the gardens along our street filled with the scent
of stocks and nicotiana,
but it didn't get properly hot till the night drew in,
humid and heavy as glass
on our well-kept lawn.
It was high in the summer. With everyone else
in town for the Lammas fair
I took the meadow-path to where the river
stalled on a sudden blackness: alders
shrouded in night and warmth, and the first slow owl
charting the further bank.
There was always movement there
beneath the slick of moonlight on the turning
water, like a life beneath the life
I understood as cattle tracks and birds:
a darker presence, rising from the stream,
to match my every move, my every breath.
Eel-black and cold, it melded in my flesh
with all the nooks and crannies of the world
where spawn appears, or changelings slip their skins
to ripen at the damp edge of the day,
still blurred with mud
and unrecovered song.
But that night, as the sky above me turned,
I found a different swimmer in the steady
shimmer of the tide,
a living creature, come from the other side
to slip into the cool
black water. I remember how she looked,
beneath the moon, so motiveless and white,
her body like a pod that had been shelled
and emptied: Mrs Pearce, my younger sister's
science teacher, turning in the lit
amazement of a joy that I could almost
smell, across the haze of drifting heat.
I was crouched beneath a stand
of willows and I guess she didn't see
the boy who watched her swim for half an hour
then turn for home beneath the August moon,
a half-smile on her face, her auburn hair
straggling and damp;
yet later, as I walked the usual streets,
I thought that she would stop and recognise
a fellow soul, with river in his eyes,
slipping home under a wave of light and noise,
and finding the key to her nights
in his soft, webbed fingers.