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
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 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
We go on spinning sentence after sentence
The oak’s bones fallen at night, the potted plant brown from fright
A sum of us dripping wax, stories slump from the eye of the sun as loss runs away
another lost year
1Scott Bradfield
