winter by john burnside

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 a snowfall.

Out in the dark, the woods are from a map
That someone has left unfinished: hand-coloured 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.