Sometimes I like using simple, massive, mystical blocks of words
like 'the one person of love', and the way
you are that person when you say those words…
Sometimes I just like vernacular peaches you know
ones you get from the market in a brown paper bag
the stallholder spins in their hands to twist closed
I like the wide avenue–change of the sea at Palm Beach
the streetlights in a corner of the ocean
a place of many blistering salts and German cars
a moment where the hurting dice of my words are still falling

Does life get stranger, more radiant, like the country from this place?
The centrifuge–petal of a heart, always one's own
and your breath in autumn a silver vapour
like a metal worn so thin it is translucent, like Honesty
still cupping seed
the genocide-mapping Nazi, poring over Minsk and Kiev
the sleeve of his SS uniform worn so fine
you can see the Chinese monk within it
howling with Zen laughter at a story of clouds
or pottering around in the monastery
considering the Buddha's words:
He who is thoughtless is as if dead already

You love me and naturally I stay close to the gravity of your eyes
that whole sleepy planet of looking
a whole moon of bearing down, and the fate of sunrise
Formal buffers of this kind produce a stranger, I know that,
and essentially oneself a place you get to
like a summit where the air is rare
struggling up the mountainside–rest of day by day
immersed in the hazard, such as this raw six and one
that luck is you, and all the fortune of arriving:
the ocean dealing its endless hand
in suits of Roars, Spumes, Shaves and Spills
with that haunting sound of the definite game of spaces
the shore I always associate somehow with Shakespeare
and resurrection — with, now, someone's Illyria

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.