1.

These are the words that are on my mind, that are cluttering the other words that wait to be written, sober, calm, confident, relaxed.

Some are abstract, many. But this is what metaphors are for, pulling meaning to focus, to bark our shins with revelation in the frozen evening, running starved and severe with no jacket in the wrong direction, miserable and out of our minds.

Slip. Sharp. Pierced. Dark. Even blood shows black and white in the night.

2.

This is the way I imagine you: complex and learned, sincere, intelligent, strange and brimming. Soft footed, soft worded, even sitting you crept along rafters, spying, and I was the one who noticed.

Dear darling I imagine you humble and able. Dear darling I imagine you so gifted with brilliance. Dear darling I imagine you basking in kingdoms of kindness and the calm promise of princes, fixing cruelness and translating tongues liquid and easy until every thingword is a part of the poem of peace. I imagine you laughing in a long line of laughers.

A long line of laughers like the long line of angels I was meaning to mention, who go back in time with no end, who step from the afternoon air, who incline above me in ovals of light in the way that they do, who lean down in a line to unveil the perpetual forehead touch, the kiss that soothes desire, opens the portal, shakes out surrender amid senseless music, overwhelming whale sounds glorying forth from sudden romances of keys and passion, protection and water, and all the instruments of prayer. An afternoon spell in a border town.

I imagine you with quiet children in your arms, staring into the sun, among turbulent grape vines. No, wait, those are my vines. Their green, your gold, snapshot of that day down the road made from gardens.

And there are we, guessing answers: bee, flower, honey, air, riprap, mountain range, diamond, pearl, dream of sleep in thirdfloor chairs far apart in a darkening room in the afternoon, triangulated, tertiary, the comfort of quiet thought, a provisional pause, imperfect, in between time, rolled cuffs, tempers held, for now, too young, too old, too shy, too bold. Too many stories told. They pull on those untold.

Dear darling I imagine together we could have been whisperers of unripe tutors fretfully mastering books ricocheted between headhunters and now lodged in quarters too close to home, sitting on floors behind locked doors stacking bicycle parts and contemplating cats.

I imagined it good, showed the holes, the trunks, the bones, what I hoarded, the secrets, deaths, history, inspired by things unmonied, unlabelled, yet read, yet favoured, still open, glee, heart, what wishes, which puns, frolics, fetishes, unmetered, unfettered, unfiltered, no regrets, nothing hidden, you saw, and you laughed and wept. Or was that part of the dream.

3.

These are the words that are on my mind that are standing silently in the road outside and waiting for the winter.

Dear darling, I imagined you brimming.