Imagined Interiors

The colour came later,
Past the dark cluttered words.

Tonight we spoke like a frequency graph,
Like a landscape without edges,
Extruded strokes of light to my lips like fingers
stretching through the architecture of your words.
To cocoon the sounds in my ear longer

I scavenge images to furnish this room
that holds you in sprawling pieces
with feathered edges that overlap and repel.
I smear the walls with my tender vision.

This passage doesn’t permit complexity.
A blocked aperture half-closed
by the debris left by a fragment fallen
from the frozen eye of the storm.
It obstructs my view of your dislocation.

Someone coughs in the background.
Your voice lowers to a soft tendril,
I hear your body turn in your sheets
As you describe the darkness
that stares back at you.

In these implicit movements I accrue
the inescapable graduation of weightless light
that reaches from me to you under a heavy winter.

Colour will slide in the morning
over the outline of your refuge.
(like an unfinished house)
Like music climbs through those sounds.