Issue 30: Iain Britton

Enclosed in Parenthesis — (ghosting)

I

time resonates an ecology of substance

to be viewed  

from a night of white flowers ghosting through dreams

change is taking off one’s clothes is putting them on

is living between mirrors feeling pulses

temperatures     passion’s brief journey its lap

of honour i swallow a deity’s breath  living off

its radiance   its brightly-lit interpretation of earth talk

i’m part of the uncontaminated kiss

II

a youthfulness is played out 

                a garland of static reverie

complements this girl’s fulfilment 

a wind shift

threatens the nature of small freesias

growing in the brushed lines of her hair in the exposed  

fluctuations of who she might be a mother

& child clasped together

III

cloaked in colour        beyond

the touch of hands       beyond poetry

breeders & priests      i feel deeply the prize

of her own perfection      smooth

like a large exaggerated peach unblemished

by fingers licked at by rain   by family intrusiveness

quilted into the soft cladding of her clothes    

i acknowledge

the love child of a Piscean birth

IV

a magnolia’s deformity attracts love’s obstinacy

not to walk away     but to reflect on 

the transformative nature of spring’s wild branches     

of birds newly-hatched   newly-ruffled & scampering away

to ceremonies of survival

V

venerated by generations youths dive for coins

plunge amongst bubble chains

where fish hang deep & curious       the river captures

nerves in clouds   a school choir passes

& i agitate the water’s surface

                                   a glitz of sunlight somersaults

i rake my fingers amongst islands of fern

picking up scaly flakes from a peeled-off season

VI

later i explore a composite entity hunched up      crowded

but never alone

the girl lives on music in the blood        she 

leans against her cello  her cello feels for her hands

she steps silently into the circumference of a sound

VII

curative properties indulge themselves

              entering furtively        i look at

this peristaltic flow of exposure

i look at the moon hooked to a branch

it claims affinity     it swings       it swivels      

& the whole tree lights up a shadow slithers

ripe for the picking   it coils around the girl’s arm

nudges at her face paints her lips green

then disappears

into the moon’s mouth   shining wet & sipping

VIII

            mirrored in images    

the sky grips the earth’s back

grips its skin      & sinks into a deep blue stillness

hugs multiple streams     rocks     hills

it contracts & suddenly

arching night colours

     reshape the gravitational pull

IX

          to know the girl

her body   her fingerprints on books on vases 

on my everyday living   time’s

corrosive features seem tangible enough i touch

the phantom of a picture

the blurred white outline

of a future

the widening soundshell of the universe

it holds a collective calling 

the immediacy of her body in mine     our youth

walking on mirages of water

X

appropriation speaks of love-taking

of landscape-taking

& a sky full of balloons   & what

becomes of them       these balloons some are snagged by fissures

in clouds   some are dragging their strings

across paddocks & the girl trapped in her own astral orbit

                           rolls herself in liquid gold

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