It is now much later, and you have gone,
and in the transient night between
the fluttering lids of eyes
a measureless time has intervened
with its soft hands,
with its soft, set-designer's hands,
has taken down the steeple, rearranged the streets,
has quietly slipped into its sack of rust and darkness
all the presents you have ever known –
the old red postvan, the rows of sticky limes, the sunlight on the Sporthotel –
has slung your town in rattling pieces
over his shoulder, and has strode away
across the plains,
growing smaller and smaller
nearing a horizon
you will never see.

Then Change rises
with her strange amnesiac waters,
with her eddying blur, and fade, and dissolution,
rises up, and floods her banks,
breaching all restraining walls, drowning, at last, the peeping rooves,
making her epic motion picture of liquids,
bowling her hoop in her white-and-violet sailor-suit,
skipping, eating a peach, in laced-up boots,
brooding, enigmatic, perplexing as she
assembles her jigsaw of cloud.

After this, nothing.
After roiling smoke, a pouring interim,
after swept-out proportions, the wobbling sky,
only now is the puzzle once again unpieced,
spilt milk cow by cow, brick by runny brick
as, through the shredding haze,
the city appears below and ahead,
all its minutiae exposed, a pop-up book
expanding fantastically towards us
and then rapidly, suddenly slowing:
only now do we once again
enter a domain of Stillness,
an empire of dazzling, crystalline facts,
neat and granular as sugarcubes –
the stalk of pylons across brown ploughed fields,
the sliced lute of an avocado on the chopping board –
only now may you enter this home that was yours
where nothing is as you left it,
where nothing remains, all is scrubbed clean,
pared to the bone,
a metropolis of shining emptiness.

Wait, though. Turn the corner, as you must,
by the wooden hoarding with its ripped flyposters,
after walking, it seems, forever to be here,
suddenly you come again upon
the old hill in the shady suburb where,
behind its railings and crumbling walls,
still the old house persists
in a crackling and spotted light
like a charred photograph,
like a mound of shoes,
like a child’s toy train,
lying on its side,
derailed in time;
and still the old, ambient, creeping life goes on
like tenacious mould gnawing a half-eaten cheese,
like a radio, abandoned, lost, weeps and croons,
wandering the airwaves, searching for a station.

Glide through the gates: go in.
No one moves among the fruit trees.
It is long after the single, terrified scream from the orchard;
long after the traumatised gardener was led away
and all cultivation ceased:
see, the grounds darken ever more
locked in their coma of rhododendron and ipomea
(they dream a vegetable satiation);
there are rabbits in the stables,
and time is measured here
only by the soft slump of plaster,
the chronometry of dust,
only by a lone and startled eye
staring blindly back up from the wooden floor
to the empty, starshaped socket
of an angel’s rotting face.

So the great eastern tower
fell, and the long-decaying wing
was closed-up. By then, many years had passed
since the jewelled music from the drawing room
ended, and the occasional sessions
of Tarot, ouija and seance
were permanently adjourned.
It is later when the gloomy, lovesick astronomer
leaves this employ, his charts spread out
near the leaded study window
as if for the sun and the moon, and all his starry pupils,
to observe in his absence,
and to learn his rules:
(slowly they faded in their circles).
Slowly the slates slipped, and the sky fell through.
Slowly the wormshot rafters powdered.
Slowly the woodlice invaded, and the spiders established their household.
Always the gargoyles stared out, guarding
megabytes of crumbling genealogies,
lines of faltering patrimony.
Once, suddenly, fire announced a new dispensation:–
an axiom of rapid feet and marching jaws.
Slowly the charred doll’s smile embered.
Slowly the embers cooled, and the soft beak
and claws of the rain sank in, and tore.
Slowly the hegemony of the clouds commenced.
Slowly the new tongue set in.
Slowly we are gone.

Come closer.
Enter the capacious cellars of this house,
enter the roots, enter them, they sigh,
by stairs with steps which are fatigued
and be bathed in an air which cannot be stirred,
and which should never stir, and which yet
is faintly stirring:
enter this slum, this backwater
with its derelict climate
of fetor, enter
an unsettled place:
descend into a land of bricks and vents,
a plain of fir trees,
enter a terrain of mounds and sheds,
and of desolate workings,
and come deeper,
under the timbers,
among the roots of trees
where memories have come undone,
and hands whir past on bat-wings
beating to and fro, hopelessly, between the walls
endlessly seeking the touch they have lost.

Where wounded mouths flutter, and roll and flutter,
like lipstick grouse;
or glide, muttering, close to the ground,
among dark woods,
or sit alone in grey branches at dusk
singing, 'Helige, Helige'.
Where the temple is caught under a fingernail.
Where kisses are left on trains.
Where trains are left on kisses.
Where the psalm of the smoke rises
into the factory clouds of snow,
above a bush of murmuring voices,
with lips for leaves,
above the woodsman with his axe,
above the heaps of spectacles,
and the heaps of cinders,
where the gardener throws
to the wind the wet ashes
of a burned rose.

Skin is lit that has no owner
where the bureaucrat opens his head like a smooth draw,
and sharpens a pencil of accurate tears.
We regard him closely, looking over his shoulder,
directly into his face:
he is stroking his little tapeworm moustache,
and dreaming of his wife, and of his mistress,
while over him and the neat, grey tables
a lamp burns blindly through the night figurework.

Under the day, under the boards, underfoot,
under the telephone of bone
hung with its dripping voices,
an industry of shift and yaw goes on,
soft-focus, hinting,
under the floral wallpaper, and the antnest clock,
under the sea,
a settlement, a subsidence,
a shipment of grip and slurs, of grab, of hold,
a scuttling,
and through the small room of clean planes and true surfaces
with the murmur of a disturbed hive
a glacier of crushed and screaming snails and gas enters
with a hammering of waxy nails,
with rosy cheeks, with creamy skin,
with cherry, cherry-red lips,
with the slow big amber of a personal tear.

Nosferatu.
Tethered like a zeppelin, his brown cocoon of sleep
floats over all, sways slowly, grandly.
His cruel mouth is full of snow.
His heavy eyelids crush all day.
His mind is full of gradually rising
and falling pale blue spheres,
tattooed like Montgolfier balloons,
stretched tight, with the inner skin of trains,
of journeys thought too long,
on dull, hot summer days:
his lip curls down, he is dreaming,
dreaming sleep,
Nosferatu. Miles below him,
in the still sunlight on the moors,
the tiny figure of the amateur entomologist
crawls in tweeds, with knapsack and hiking boots,
magnifier glittering in his hand
as he combs the undersides of leaves
to order into families
the caterpillar-eggs he finds,
oblivious that, on his shoulder,
a massive, brooding shadow glides.

His nails are long and helter-skelter,
like anorexic knives, like flying sobs,
his hands are winged with tiny screams,
his storm ignores them and his shape changes,
his ball of lightnings, fur and doors.
You take small steps on creaking ground.
The stairs descend, you hold your kiss out
like a trembling light, like a fragile anchor,
dragged on the seafloor, to and fro:
you are unable to rest, having already fallen asleep.
Your kiss goes out: my hand moves in.
My kiss moves in: your hands punch out.
The moon slides behind a cloud;
my kiss slips under your skin
and fans out; it has far to go.
You are swept, back and forth, in a languorous tide.
See: this vegetable portion is vast, a guru’s beard,
substances that null and grope,
my roots of drool and torpor,
my morphine cars.

The earth here is full of sighing, swollen plants.
The ocean snarls and impends, impends and withdraws.
The mouth of things hangs slack.
The senile gums of Time are bared.

Oh, Master. On which side of the dead
mirror of your eyes am I, Master?
On which side of your modern walls,
of your walking river,
of your close, folio revolver, Master? Master,
enter through my amnesiac doors,
into an open book of rain and arms,
an atlas of steel cantons, bound in a cloudy state
where lovers hold each other,
where she enters his bright faintness with her stroking fingers,
in a fugue with tongues,
a sleeping chamber of absence and 3,
in a slippery physics of desire, and loss’s causation,
until their caress has them
like tender effects.
Inside, there’s an embargo on motion,
a still cyclone of drifting smoke and stiff rooms,
of peeping angles, of torn verbs,
and the melted journey of a kiss
you begin as a lover among fresh, startled conifers of blood
glistening in the quiet light of early morning, a kiss
you begin among wheat and green grasshoppers,
among hungry coal and cornflowers, you end suddenly

expelled into a dry white room,
a white terminus which has laid
batches of white eggs in faintly sticky mounds,
each mound a creeping pyramid of eggs,
each egg a white room, each room a terminus,
each egg swiftly ticking with the egg inside,
though I call to you, across the divide, from a black room,
from the ferns and the mud, and from the hot rain
where nothing stands discrete,
where we are inseparable, all the invisible
Siamese of a heavy twin
you carry with you and who weeps endlessly,
softly and endlessly, just beyond earshot.

His house this time is nubile,
his wings are neon, his claws are needles,
he pulls a hard freight of kicks and cold beer
in leathers and suede
where he floated over you, soundlessly,
and you were dancing.
Now you lie on the bed, (you’re not dancing),
you look pale,
you called for a weight of ashes,
but he entered your state and soon will leave,
being a drifter, on a fake passport, a book of stills,
in this motel room on the edge of nothing
after the stockings, the knickers and the alps of laundry
on the other side of the side,
your breath smelling bad and the light
looking for a love to come in:
Zippo lighter, ashtray, faded jeans,
and the diseased aeroplane of a single fly
revving its dirty motor above us,
I have been here forever and a day,
inside this floating sphere with the sound
of transcontinental trains floating past in an adjacent sphere:
now this day will take forever,
this is the day you will wake up,
nauseous, forever, in your own room.

I have been here for so long, here and not here,
hanging with my faded, typographic wings,
in the darkness,
head to the earth, claws to the ceiling,
and my blood has formed a frightened tree
of brittle branches, issuing in frozen hands,
each one with a message,
like buds of white magnolia –
I bid you open one. Only
come a little closer, sweetheart,
come and sip from these staring, rigid eyes
my eyes which are all need, and all hunger,
my eyes which are need and near a wet mouth.

I want to enter you
like cold wire coiled in cream.
I want to put you in my mouth
like a strawberry of felt.
My kisses spread, with their tiny diamond parachutes
out across your sky, floating down, endlessly,
on your skin
to take root.

Even here
I have no intention of dying.
You think you can leave me?
Walk out of my eyes, take a road, any one,
from an asphalt pack,
and walk:
do you think you are leaving me?
Every step that you take
brings you back to me.
You might as well
leave your own eyes, like a tip, on a saucer.
Walk: run.
I am with you.
I am the road itself,
I am the air that stirs
the dress against your legs in summer;
I am the breath that slips
over and around your tongue,
in between your lips,
in a slow stream:
we are as close
as this.
I have given you my voice:
now, you can never give it back.
Can you?
And suddenly, look, the faded blood glistens,
and again I string out my share,
and more,
fastened to your throat
like a harrowing song.
I have loved you so deeply
there are places in you
even you haven’t been,
where the sea has no name,
and the mirrors, like Samson, are blind:

love,
after the fire,
even after the fire,
after the temple has fallen,
love,
after the storm has passed over, and the rain fallen quiet,
after the revolution,
after the revolution and the rain,
after the weeds sprouting over the ruins,
love,
after our mouths have spoken,
after our words are ash,
after our touch has passed,
after the war has passed by, the soldiers retreated down the road

but before you take, love, another breath,
before you leave me,

remember, we have carried our light
on our backs like Samson,
until the sea has no name,
and the mirrors have lost their eyes,
and we have lain
blind among the ruins
of the temple of our imagery.

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.

Go to Michael Ayres' commentary on 'Nosferatu'

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