(for Dag Andersson)
At one time, I looked forward to the dance: wandering back and forth in the quiet heat of an August morning, packing the car with cup cakes and lemonade, boxes of plums or cherries, petits-fours, nuts and spice-cake, mousse and vol-au-vents. At noon I would go upstairs to wash and change - Sunday best, a clean white shirt and tie - while mother made her face and fixed her hair. It was something we did, every year, in that backwater town, abandoning our lawns and flower beds, to meet the patients, out at Summerswood. It seemed a privilege to be allowed within those gates, and know we might return, to see the meadows, striped with light and shade, the silent lake, the fallen cedar trees. We went there for the dance: a ritual of touch and distance, webs of courtesy and guesswork; shifts from sunlight into shade; and when the patients came downstairs to join us, smiling, utterly polite, in new-pressed clothes, like cousins twice-removed, they had the look of people glimpsed in mirrors, subtle as ghosts, yet real, with the vague good-humour of the lost. How we appeared to them, I can only imagine: too solid, perhaps, too easy with ourselves, sure of our movements, blessed with a measured desire. All afternoon we picnicked on the lawn then danced in awkward couples to the hiss of gramophones, as daylight turned to dusk; a subtle exchange in the half-light; acts of grace: townsfolk conferring the weight of a normal world, homes in the suburbs, the brisk lives of men who can sleep, the practised charm of women who believe, who wake and forget what they dreamed, and go off to work, and wish for nothing. Beside the patients, we were lithe and calm: we doled out charity and easy praise and waited for the dancing to erase the pain in the knot of the throat, the birdlike angle of defeat against the spine. We loved them for the way they witnessed us, standing in twos and threes in the waning light, made other by the rhythm of the dance, the pull of a larger world, and that taste on the air of birch-woods and streams: that knowledge of ourselves as bodies clothed in brightness, moving apart and coming together, cooling slowly, as the lawns and rose-beds cooled, heat seeping out from the skin and bleeding away, the goldenrod turning to smoke at the fence line. Friendships began out there, to be resumed year after year, the difficult months between absolved by the summer light; and once, a love affair, of sorts: an awkward boy finding a girl, and leading her, mock-unwilling into the lighted circle of the dance, to venture steps that felt like steps on ice, the floorboards creaking, and thin as paper. They danced less than an hour, then she was gone, and when he went back, next morning, the nurses turned him away. I think of her every day, I dream her skin, and for years I have driven out, in the August heat, alone now, with Mother gone, and my contributions store-bought: jars of pickles; cling-wrapped bread. I stand by myself, excused from the solid ring of bodies and, for minutes at a time, I see it all from somewhere far above, some landing in the house, some upper room: it makes me think of pictures I have seen of dancers - wisps of movement on a lawn at sunset: faces muffled, bodies twined; the figures so close to the darkness, they might be apparitions, venturing on form, pinewoods above the lake, a suggestion of watchers, a gap between night and day, between light and shade, and faces melting, one into the next as if they were all one flesh, in a single dream, and nothing to make them true, but space, and time.
John Burnside
One of Scotland's most exciting poets, John Burnside was born in 1955 and lives in Fife. His collections of poetry include Normal Skin The Asylum Dance (published this year by Jonathan Cape). The Asylum Dance in which this poem appears, has been shortlisted for this year's Whitbread Award for Poetry.