Scandinavia

I think I could be happy there, north of fame, in light
unbroken, blending the imagined hours’ horizons into sky, sky
through soft-heaped fields, unclaimed, their rims forever
reforming at the wind’s deft caprice. I could try

to live as a glass of water, utterly clear and somehow
restrained, a sip that tells you nothing
but perpetuates the being-there; could sit, lie, settle down, the white
of one idea entirely lost upon another, as rain is lost

in the shift of the sea, as a single consecrated face
drowns in the swell of the Saturday host, and the notion of loving
that one critically more than any other flake in a flurry
melts, flows back to folly’s pool, the lucid public dream.

from Public Dream (Picador, 2007), © Frances Leviston 2013, used by permission of the author and the publisher

Frances Leviston was born in Edinburgh in 1982 and grew up in Sheffield. She read English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and ...
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