My time will come.
Perhaps, because it's spring, I feel like that –
serene, you know, and with my work
rising like a wave.

Of course, the time to come cannot belong to me —
how could it?
That would be like saying
'this powder-blue sky is mine'.
Owners are so foolish, aren't they, Love?

There's something dusty about this spring —
that first dryness, you know; and the warmth:
something you've sensed before
which when it wakes wakes memory, too,
a memory of the wide openness
of a single morning,
a memory of the possible which
is a young man, looking impossibly cool,
a glass bowl of roses, still just buds,
a scratched desk, the early Poems
of Pablo Neruda.

Something… And it's not what's in the book
but in the phasing, powder-blue sky
and the quiet streets,
Sunday empty,
as if the town itself had yawned and swallowed
then grown attentive, trembling,
waiting to be inhabited.

No: the book's closed:
what moves out there, beyond the dusty window sill,
something more waiting than moving, perhaps,
has not been written, yet —
and it never will be:
how could you horizon round
even the tiniest moment
of all there is,
a life indefinite, the sweet, elusive
nature of the possible itself?

He's just a hazy boy, really —
zealous about himself, of course, but still
unable to detach himself entirely
from the shimmering, urban spring sky,
a polluted lavender,
or from the sketchy, crayon electric buds of coral pink
or from the hand which holds the pen and which
a few hours ago
stroked his girlfriend's hair
and still not sure
which is the first event, the one
he obscurely feels he came here for.

Destiny. Vocation.
What became of him?
Perhaps he never wrote the poem which would
align the universe within his dream —
maybe he thought too much about himself,
or about the alphabet,
phonemes or rhyme schemes,
semantics or the vernacular,
performance or the supercool, sugary cliques whom he mistook
for readers, when they
were the braid on a uniform
the officer himself hated, in the end, to wear,
and yearned for the evenings
when he could bathe
and be naked with his wife.

Or perhaps he wrote the poem,
and did not see it, put it aside.
Or wrote the poem,
but did not feel it.
Or perhaps he only ever really wrote prose
that medium of propriety
and never understood
words do not own the world
but are in love with it.

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.

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