My whole world is all you refuse: <br />a black light, angelic and cold <br />on the path to the orchard, <br />fox-runs and clouded lanes and the glitter of webbing, <br />little owls snagged in the fruit nets <br />out by the wire <br />and the sense of another life, that persists <br />when I go out into the yard <br />and the cattle stand round me, obstinate and dumb. <br />All afternoon, I've worked at the edge of your vision, <br />mending fences, marking out our bounds. <br />Now it is dusk, I turn back to the house <br />and catch you, like the pale Eurydice <br />of children's classics, venturing a glance <br />at nothing, at this washed infinity <br />of birchwoods and sky and the wet streets leading away <br />to all you forget: the otherworld, lucid and cold <br />with floodlights and passing trains and the noise of traffic <br />and nothing like the map you sometimes <br />study for its empty bridlepaths, <br />its hill-tracks and lanes and roads winding down to a coast <br />of narrow harbors, lit against the sea.<br /><br />John Burnside<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/agoraphobia/
