You know,
my writing would be nothing without you.
I mean this prosaically — quite literally.
I couldn't write the lines about how my words
are linked to that someone
who will cry the last tear on earth
without you.

Really, my writing would be nothing without you.
You made the difference in my life
we can call poetry.
I believe you understand that now.
And I hope you understand why this poem is in so larger a part silence —
why it's prosaic.

There are certain things between us.
We have, as they say, a history.
(They say so many stupid things.)
But I love you like the rain
which envelopes the town as it moves on through it
and which touches so many things with one touch.

There are certain things between us.
An ochre car, a desert and, today,
a hundred miles of silence.
And I may be wrong, but I still believe what I once said to you —
that between us, from now on,
things will always be totally cool.

You probably don't know those lines by Pasternak
which roughly translate as:
you took down from the shelf the book of my life
and blew the dust from the name.
Well, the book is still, in some sense, lying there,
and my name blows in the dust
but your breath disturbs all that is best in me,
and carries me away from myself
across a hundred miles of silence.

A hundred miles, a hundred silences — and a word.
There are certain things between us.
I say so many stupid things,
but this, at least, is true:
you made the distance in my life
that poetry calls me.

I've seen beautiful things.
But you know, they would be nothing without you.
Of course the day would be a day — that is endless.
But it would not be the same day.
The night would be a night,
but it would never be this night —
it would not be this long, inescapable night.

My biography is relatively unimportant to me.
I claim no power for myself
except a power over wordsto write truthfully about certain things,
and about things which are uncertain
to write ambivalently.

A power over words is a gift.
It's impersonal, like the rain.
Sometimes you walk through it, sometimes run from it.
You know things could be a different way.
But, like the rain, I love you:
eventually, doubt becomes irrelevant,
and if you're a puzzle, you're a puzzle to which I'll stay faithful
for the rest of my life — you and I, we're totally cool.

You will not be the last person I love,
and you weren't the first that I loved.
But you changed me —
took down that book of my life from its shelf —
and made love possible.

There are certain things between us.
The Barents, the Pacific, the English Channel —
literal distances, at times, only a metaphor
could surmount. But we had the metaphors,
or, if we didn't have them, we made them.
And in this case, I know what those metaphors are called.

Now, you're cast up to where
you always wanted to be — but the sea is still moving.
And you know, perhaps more than anyone, the colour of my eyes;
and how if I'm to be truthful,
I'll recall that any gaze is a metaphor.

You give me the simplest things — a desire
to form these words in line from left to right
or, with a Zen simplicity,to be through the whole day
a single piece of the day.
And you have made of me
something slight and irretrievable
like the passing of a shower of rain
over the silence of a hundred miles.

Simone Weil said 'Separation is love'.
Forgive the prosaic nature of this poem
and the fact that it is for the most part silence.
At its base
the last human tear on earth is forming.

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.

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