The heart ground like a star map laid out before us is action
we wear it we clothe it it fits us
loosely in footsteps and standstills
a child going 'oh!' and pointing at the sky
and you saying 'Moon'

Mm, it's so close to our fingers but distant with import
and we wear it it bears us we wear it
sometimes a surface stony bible or Gobi and sometimes
your lover's rippled skin in bathwater intimate
with some whorled time in Gemini or sometimes
lit with small green flames like a notion of spring or
small golden flames like a Medici autumn but whatever
we wear it and move on it move and where
we glance it waits for us, loyal with motion
a glimpse of disturbed wings, and a limitless rising

In August the Philosophy
section of the bookshop is cool and the lemon–
flash goldfinches haunting the pages once
bore small hearts and fluttered the branches now
Quine and Nietzsche sit on singing and I
en route to the tree of signs
leaf through pulped truths and sure pineneedle a prioris
in a mettle-doved moment a finger alighting
between concepts of change tempered with stasis
and in the zinc-butter smoothness this summer has passing
in its bug heat and egg-laden perfumes
I think of you and Tsushima, Barbarossa and Georgia, I
think of you in time as if of a small
dacha with faded green shutters hidden deep
in a remote forest location and of the way
sometimes you cry simply for the world as if
it might one day just rest its head upon your shoulder and of how
sometimes you seem to jump awkwardly away
from your own close words
like a frightened child
startled by a butterfly

Say something for me now say 'Russia'
with a sound of a watermelon being sliced in two, into
halves of silence, crushed like snow say
something so cold, something walking for hours
in broken shoes under old ice-scorched skies
of endless, Chagallian blue say something
filled with absence
something cool and unholy try to put
'Russia' in your mouth to say
something bereft totally unborn say something affectless
and cutting edge astrophysical put the slender
wafer of 'Russia' in your mouth
say something no one has ever said before
and try to hold out for it try to hold on to it
if you can and call it a new star something
like Hannah and like the small hands of Hannah
pointing and reaching touching
parting in a new space, telling us a new time

And 'Russia', with its huge cocoons of distance, its azure delve
of heaven-Steppes, and (nearer in)
the small empirical monastery up there on the hill
its peeling whitewashed walls gold onion dome the sparse little
copse of silver birches flickering in the breeze
is rolled up into the plane of speech
and carried away
like the emptiness between us: shh! can you hear
along with the Chekhovian cartographer the curious engineer
the outside-studded stars the moon the trees
being undermined that muffled sound
is earth being shifted someone
is tunelling towards us
bearing who-knows-what perhaps

1 Night
2 Ourselves
3 A small Montezuma face, a small Tutankhamen face
4 Feathers, a ghost of gold
5 Singing q
6 The Masque of Each Death, or no light on the moondial
7 Bombs, or a footfall on Mt Ararat
8 Time, moving slowly like a shadow on a crumbling wall in Sunset, Arizona
9 Knowledge of what we may do now
10 The heart ground like a star map laid out before us


5.viii. 1997

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.