from Homage to Cy Twombly

This is how it works in children’s books,
how most of what you know is reconstruction,
something inferred from the shadow you catch in a mirror;

and this is how it works in love and art;
how, sometimes, the shape of the wind on an empty street
is all you know of home: a field of rain

or one last boat returning from the sound,
the blown light on its deck sudden and large,
no less a fact than radio, or ozone –

though later, when you wake beneath the dark,
like someone who would pray, if he had prayers,
another version of that child arrives

from somewhere else, the gravity of love
and kinship in his face, a child who knows
the way your skin is made from touch and thaw

and threads of cold you brought in from the frost
with something he broke in the old days and couldn’t relinquish
knowing his time would come, in this other life,
to gather the pieces and magic them back together.

John Burnside