The day never ceases: not this one, nor this.
A great crowd of moments goes rushing by,
and there among them, unnoticed,
one moment that is quiet.
It is the moment I see you.
And it's like a child,
standing alone, patiently waiting in a busy street.
It is the first moment I will ever have.
I love this moment,
ignored by everyone else,
but on which they depend — so gently.
And I think that, one day, all the time in the world will come to this.

The spring flickers into life,
its new heat flaring,
breath from a lamb's mouth.
It rocks, unsteady on its heels.
The white vesuvius pear tree is fizzing petals,
they scatter everywhere.
I want to go chasing after them
and pick them up, but of course
it's too late, it's impossible.

Because suddenly it's August,
a city crushed by thunder's blue pestle,
the sweet leech of my heart clinging on,
slipped like a drug between lightning and lightning:
it's the emptying of streets, the scattering of footsteps,
and no one left out in the open
to gather the rain.

Because it's September, and a year
grown greedy for us, grown ravenous:
the gardens deserted, and windfall pears
thumping down like green, desultory tears.

Because it's our life, passing by so close to us,
as strange and as intimate
as a blind man sitting peacefully
beside a mirror.

Because it's already here, and it's too late,
the moment we suddenly
bump up against our own hearts
the way sea-swimmers
are brushed against driftwood.

Because it's impossible, this snow falling, now, the flakes
(each one an instant)
blown in ragged flurries off the pear tree,
making a fool of spring.

Because this is the moment, and it always is,
and it's raw, and near, and impossible
as any star.

Because you're so far from this sky, which empties us,
always too soon,
because we can't use it: it's too late.

And because of this emptiness,
this loss which is everywhere,
and finds us in everything
sometimes I can hardly bear
to look in your face: it's too late.

But because I know, at last,
this loss is ours,
and belongs to us alone,
calling this loss love,
here, now and impossible, burning, we are.

Now I'm buried at the foot of these days
and they stretch above me, and before me,
and behind me, it seems, forever.
I'm passed over, unheeded
by these mountains of time and cloud.
Now the mosquito on my hand is king,
and I'm tethered to my breath by a thread so fine
luck is its shadow,
I don't know what to call the light.
When the storm comes, barging through the trees,

I'm mostly no one, a road,
a roll of such fragile dice
they seem to crumble as they go,
a molten glimpse of pear blossom in the wind,
a few words torn from the air,
and swallows rippling in the heat-haze fields
of my childhood, a path ahead that faded
into the ripening wheat.

Sometimes I think we're only as strong as our weakness.
A shower comes, drinking our footsteps.
We run under the thunder,
and are chased over the reflected sky
by the insects and stars which can only succeed us.
Sometimes I think we're almost nothing,
only a space things happen in,
less than the scents of wet grass we brush as we walk by,
only a glance holding up the moon,
only a brief taste in our mouths of immemorial rain.

And yet, you are so beautiful,
in the moment I see you,
that moment I love you –
the one like a child, standing alone, quiet,
patiently waiting in a busy street –
I know the day must first come to us
for the permission to take our lives,
and under the heel of the breeze
I pity all frail things,
especially the diamond.

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.

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