More Heidegger, More Scots

The professor teaching the critical theory seminar I'm in this semester also specializes in Scottish literature, and so we've read a few Scottish poems as part of our class discussions of Heidegger and related philosophy. This poem, by John Burnside, came up early in the semester in our lectures on Heidegger's Being and Time and "What is Metaphysics?" The central concept here is that of "worlding," the way that the human, or in Heidegger's terminology, Dasein, being-there, creates the "world" through interaction with "earth," and the possibility of a post-humanist understanding of existence. At least, that's what I think it comes down to.

"Agoraphobia"

My whole world is all you refuse:
a black light, angelic and cold,
on the path to the orchard,
fox-runs and clouded lanes and the glitter of webbing,
little owls snagged in the fruit nets
ourt by the wire

and the sense of another life, that persists
when I go our into the yard
and the cattle surround me, obstinate and dumb.
All afternoon, I've worked at the edge of your vision,
mending fences, marking out our bounds.
Now it is dusk, I turn back to the house

and catch you, like the pale Eurydice
of children's classics, venturing a glance
at nothing, at this washed infinity
of birchwoods and sky, and the wet streets leading away
to all you forget: the otherworld, lucid and cold
with floodlights and passing trains and the noise of traffic,
and nothing like the map you sometimes
study, for its empty bridlepaths,
its hill-tracks and lanes, and the roads winding down to a coast
of narrow harbours, lit against the sea.

[~1980?]