The Beauty of Dissolving Portraits

By Connor Stratton

                 After Ambrose Akinmusire’s song with the same title

 

Like an orchestra tuning:

testing how tight our boots

 

for the mountaintop, for ashes,

dying at the end of the movie,

 

the face close-up, dissolving.

Can you hear how sad this music

 

makes me? The wild grass

violas, the prairie cellos,

 

the flute whistling my eye

to the fire lookout station,

 

where a trumpet—as if muted

by a boot—is the closest

 

you’ll ever get, the way

descending into a landscape

 

dissolves it. We hang

the breathless mouthpiece

 

from our rearview. We use

a bootlace. When the brass

 

blooms into a yellow bell,

we resolve always into silence.

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