Tom Barlow

Assumptions

With apologies to Gerald Stern
 
What I assumed was skin turned out to be
fly paper. What I thought were spent rounds
turned out to be rose petals.

What I assumed were dancing shoes
turned out to be a stopwatch and what I
expected was a box of gold sparklers was in fact
that comet we all pretended we could see.

What I took to be the breath of a man fishing
through a hole in the ice turned out to be
a siren, and what I assumed was a blueprint
turned out to be the interval between the
bubble and the pop.

I later confused a stropping leather with the
last apples of fall and what I took for 
silence turned out to be the pulse of a stampede.

Tom Barlow is an Ohio writer of poetry, short stories and novels. His work has appeared in journals including PlainSongs, Ekphrastic Review, Voicemail Poetry, Hobart, Tenemos, Redivider, The North Dakota Quarterly, The New York Quarterly, The Modern Poetry Quarterly, and many more. See more at tombarlowauthor.com.