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Legend
The Theory of Relativity gently pushes the little boat out into the inlet.
She's bringing lovebirds, and they flutter in their cage.
We're in California. We're uncertain. We're in space…Apollinaire in a lemon grove composes an Alcool.
The auric lemons are becoming notes, they ripen and glow
behind the bars of music. They flutter in their cage:
their song is sharp, pasted on a flattened page —
we're in China — at war — in childhood — insomnia…A white, fabulous stillness rests at the heart of winter air.
Space is a delicious cinema. There's a unicorn
with a horn of thought projected on the screen.
We breathe quietly. Grazing lips… Pianistic teeth… Young ferns…Outside, the sky has the chemical symbol of Pb.
Lovers, holed up in a motel; suitcase, money, a .45…
…they take it slowly, lower
kisses like plumblines into each other, well…
the arms as cradles, the night in intensive care…
It's December; they're sleeping like boyars swaddled in furs;
history settles around them like snow…Forgetfulness, the most brilliant chemist, is always at work.
She's bringing lovebirds, across the sound.
I'm six years old. The eerie floor of my mind
is being swabbed by the multiplying, mazurka brooms
of the panic-stricken apprentice to the sorcerer.
Your eyes film quietly. Lights… Camera… Action!From one of Picasso's Periods, Blue or Rose, in rags
the crippled beggar, Fact, lies prone outside the palace walls.
The set is Orson Welles… The eczemic sky, Scorsese…
Brando plays Fact. And Fact alone
knows the price of grain, the weight of stars,
and the distance from the gutters to the shimmering, far-off peaks
in radiant, silent Fahrenheits.Fantasy plays Beethoven, grim and deaf,
stalking the winter streets of the pretty burgh.
He alone knows the music — but the music doesn't know him.
Fresh horse dung steams on the cobbles, chocolate and empirical…
Inside, the Prince's hounds stir,
shake their diamond collars as they rise, and growl
at sounds unknown to human ears…Thieving violins descend en masse upon the tree tops.
The goldfinch is a delightful theatre, flying on its wings;
and the bullfinch charges, the matador of sky and time.
We're in French… In Ruritania… In Literature…A painted heart, the puppet walks without the aid of strings.
It's alive! There's Time, a superb torso, being carved
by butterfly, black-framed eyes. The Ghost of the Short-Circuit…
Glittering slippers of Technicolor… An optical champagne…
The Messiah in the mirror… No one in the mirror!… Confusion…
No, a vampire, sipping light… His flickering fingernails which drip
like lightning strands of brittle candlewax…
She wants to kiss him, and his long, white skin
which floats in glimpses of shaved ivory…
Evenings, but not matinées… He will return…La voiture de M. Lermontov est arrivée.
The electric memo to the mirror fades.
Like an elegant beetle, shining in the pit,
the tailcoated conductor taps his baton on the stand: your mind,
a sparkling wand from Disney, sprinkles lunar flakes
and petals of light across the Seine…
The Eiffel Tower… A chorus of fireworks… The Opera…
The look of things, like little flames, to one, burning, slowly going blind…
Equations are bringing us across the sound…What is this word? Where is it from?
My name is Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin,
I eat cherries while I duel. My poems
baptise space. Swallows skim the water as they drink;
lovers touch; thoughts occur.
I'm going to love again. There's agile moss
growing on the ruined columns of a temple;
the roof's collapsed: Euclid's dreaming. Songbirds
chink the marble with sounds. And the eye,
smelling of puberty and mulch, more track than road, bendsaway into the trees, and leads, you guess, deeper into the forest.
Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003. Taken from the volume a.m. by Michael Ayres with the permission of the publisher, Salt Publishing, Cambridge.
