How We Imagine Ourselves


The world comes to us something like this, a coin falling in a slot quivering
Through mirrors and ink, language sets off over the field
Flat-muscled as thick-honey colour runs its fingers through our hair with the bees

Sea foam secrets in his eyes, silver raindrops a home in her ear
Braids snare each other and the heart goes on
The food we fingered, the cormorants in a bay of washed up fish, eyes and onyx keys

Each picked up in the wind’s hooks, grass, we remember light & shell
The land lanterned, and the flight around our mouth
Our stitching unguts as the cows come home

The insouciant coffins wrecked on the rocks, the inlet luminescence & blank verse
Five doves, a sable lacquer box, gloves gripping
Diamonds, as vowels drift entwined on the shore


Begun at the roots of the feet in the grass, tall stands reconciliation

The crackle of laugh outracing death’s pace, a box of space

Tom toms upright with the wind through our lower limbs, the creak


Draped in the beginning of a fifth decade

A contingency of webs, the gossamer trees over there considers plot in a story 

The history of luminous movement1.on a hectic rooftop in NYC, once


Tumultuous light fell in love with a man as he became shadow

Amid the squalor of biting voices, the view bent to the echo of love's lethal tug

We drop from the spinning world, dangling from curtains in cinematic gaze 


The sky carves the bones chafing, the trains we watch go by in your voice

An eloquent bang in the notice of the night as death volumes a sigh

Swallowed in a newborn layer of skin, the story of the cut remains and words add up 


Peppers and a phone cord drying along the skeleton of a grandmother’s farmhouse wall

The crunch of the crisp step inside Autumn’s shoes, the steps taken on the way to a grave

The phone on the wall still plugged in, as the line hangs with a voice frayed, 


A bird strung up in a market, the moments we stole from the world, my love

Trousers long and grown old as trees stretch like sentry and telephone pole

The song wrinkled toward the dimpled sea, we are passed-down socks


Cling to ourselves as upside-down leaves batting in the front yard

What shall survive as we go on spinning sentence after sentence

The oak’s bones fallen at night, the potted plant brown from fright


The collar upturned in a window reflection, the snow and bus sneer your name in the dawn

A voyage both of us Jasoned to get a meal for a ghost, the jukebox unsung

And the sum of us dripping wax as stories slump from the eye of the sun while loss runs.


1Scott Bradfield