It was the summer of the adjectives.
They flowered everywhere, and scattered in scented migrations.
We couldn't find the noun we wanted – home –
but made do with 'glitter' and 'warm' and 'bare'.

These came away from the stars and the breeze and the walls.
A beetle on your tanned leg was a Fabergé mountaineer,
intense and hard and sapphire – the colour of extinction.
It was harsh and rattled and spoke in dry clicks.
It wept light on your skin like a metallic tear
until I chopped my gaze in two
and it vanished through the hole in vision.
I fell on both sides of a blink as if halved with an axe
and saw the darkness coming.

It was smoke in my lungs, another toxic investment with Goldman Sachs.
Smoke, lips.
Our kiss seemed to core the sexy, laid-back afternoon.
We relaxed: 4 storeys of glory, shades –
we became quiet, because this was Summer's story.
I held a small chrome house in my hands, my Leica.
She cut out her own face with scissors – try to imagine.
This is a most unlikely story.

We couldn't find the hour we wanted.
It came away from the birds and the soul and the leaves
like a song, trickling down through green laboratories
to the rocks below. It was noon. It was hot.
It was a motion vetoed.

We patched it up with Greek and species and logic.
We tore it down with want and rabble and magic.
It was a few barefoot miles of the Children's Crusade.
It was long layman's hours of nursery flu, and a Lucozade shaman
becoming skipping Peter Rabbits on the undulant wall,
or Dan Dare's silver phallus floating just off Saturn,
the waltz music of the spheres, the stately rotations,
the feverish 100s and a talking horse.

Like flimsy knights, we armoured ourselves in lotion,
and rode the breakers to do battle with the flamboyant sun.
The full moon was so bright, I thought it might burn us.
Our kiss was a liquid axis we revolved on.
It was spacewalking, a kind of treason
and a last sight of land.
You turned me off, and you turned me on
like electricity, water or gas.

Fluid and fractured, it dripped through cracks in the lattice.
Limber and juiced, it flipped another page of Thomas Kuhn.
King of the king of kings, it somehow mattered:
it was a solid rip in things – the radiance of darkness.
It was a lacquered atom, a molecule of lapis
lazuli: it rippled in cells like a tear in my thoughts,
a flaw in the azure, a scratch on the film:
it roved through my dreams to a zone that was no-go.

It was August's, an ember, flamethrown by a volcano:
it was destined for Bond Street, a chemical jewel
elicited from a crucible – it rose out of nothing from the dust,
and crawled, strange to Nature,
through the cool science of our eyes.
It was a weird tale.
And all the photos had holes.

In details, it was bowled along in a shimmering wind of glances.
When the looking fell still, things dropped like petals
onto a dry patio, and the insect slipped away
across the stones: all need for us thrown off,
it headed back to Genesis, or to Khlebnikov.

It was a fire of unknown origin.
When the looking fell still, and the neighbours rustled
with their small, Cretaceous jaws,
sleep was a Red List, and dreams unsigned,
and light sounds filtered through the thin partitions
into the violin silence of Franz Kafka's apartment
and the violin alertness of a wakeful mind.

The sun has dried the concrete slabs of the patio.
The heat prepares the autumn stillness,
and everything's tense, like Zen paper
awaiting the first ink of a last haiku.

It was nothing given, but freedom taken away – ours.
Like evolution going into reverse,
it was a man growing whiskers, suckers, claws.
A saurian battle on the ocean floor,
it was predicates and predators,
and the subject was oozing scales and tails,
a warlike lemon and black, and liquid silver –
it oared through my sleep in a state that was slo-mo,
a vegetable person, as if by Archimboldo,
a blur of light, a wear of maws,
part theorem, part lobster, part wasp.

It was little Jean-Jacques Rousseau playing with his hoop or yo-yo.
It was the Tower, the sonnet and the moated grange.
It was tomorrow – an idea of the skull.
It was a play made by rude mechanicals,
a rustic entertainment. It was cold, the canals
froze: it was difficult to live.
It was the winter of the adjectives.

The average cloud weighs thousands of tons.
1lb exact, 1 gram, 1 mile. In the fairy tale,
the sorcerer used a telescope made of human hearts
to probe the mysteries of skies and seas,
to peer at the birth of waves and winds, of stars and planets and galaxies:
one day, he turned his gloomy mystic lens to spy
upon the ash-blonde princess, singing at her spinning wheel –
content with neither simple sight nor secret glimpses,
from his darkened, occult chamber,
the brooding sorcerer magnified, and magnified yet more
his magic instrument
to snoop beneath the hair and skin
of the ash-blonde princess, oblivious in her tower,
to delve deeper into her thoughts, and dreams, then deeper still,
until, at last, he pierced her to her innermost core –
and hated what he saw.

The sorcerer was an anatomist.
The city floats upon reflections.
Palazzi, San Marco, churches, campanile,
all upside-down in a watery red,
all ripples to the black bisection of a gondola,
in a dawn of plotting, and unease,
a mirage of gilt and peeling plaster.

The city sinks into reflections.
The grey Doge of the brain lies sequestered in his chamber
veiled from our eyes by drapes of tissue pink –
he is reclined upon his bed,
and dreams of us –
of how we moved, of how we spoke,
and what we said.

The poem is what happens – but here, there is no poem.
Words wept by themselves. The lexicon was institutional:
they'd been deloused, and their heads were shaved.
We left ourselves on one side of a bridge –
rage, goodbye – and scooped ourselves in little, fragile pieces:
many rooms, many lights, many walls, many pages.
Time passed by, an orphanage.

My life was dust, then milk.
My neighbours' child lifts the cup of his voice
to my dry lips, and I drink
something sweet and remote – the future.
It flames and holds, with effect immediately:
1 mile, 1 gram, 1lb exact –
it was a binding contract.

It was a butterfly with a hurricane
balanced on the tips of its resting wings.
It was an idle tongue, with evil in the silence.
It was a paedophobe and a paedophile.
It was an egg, with something growing in it,
something vile, sluiced in rennet.
It was an hour of sliding and of shedding scales:
it was the woodsman with his axe and horn,
a play made by brutal mechanicals.
It was a human gaze with a human child
balanced on the tips of its resting eyes.

And then the tenderness came.
All of Time's babies lay in their cots.
My eyes are Shakespeares, writing scenes – furiously.
It was pastoral, tragical, history, pastoral-comical,
tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.
They were the chosen words, and the words unchosen
crowded the windows like beggars or ghosts
keening to be heard, and to be let in.
And my eyes were organs – jellies, not oceans.
A pair of thumbs could put their writing out.
Still, as I watched you, I wrote
The Tempest, of blindness and pearls.
I wrote a script our mute gaze could hear and speak.
The tenderness came.

Starlight cracks insects between its dead jaws.
The insects tug down the stars.
A barren planet rotates on its brittle axis.
It's phosphorescent, lunar. It's without title.
It is final.

Café days glide by in hearses of smoke and sugar.
Cloudy sounds whorl and brood
like mist on the canals.
All of Time's babies are curled in their cradles.
It was a dirty word, and it caused them to curdle.
And still, all of Time's babies are being cooked in their ovens –
they're baked, they blacken, they rise, and they swell.

The wind veers and the ashes dispel.
The poem is a little girl, falling and grazing her knees;
it happens in the evening, when the sun's about to set,
and in the coming night, something is swarming wildly
in her shaking bees' nest of tears.

Sunset on the water was pink, ruffled, and blown
on a wind of verbs like a flight of flamingos –
rotten peach, fanned in a hothouse, was a porn movie, softcore.
As night fell, the lights in the skyscraper went out
one by one, and briefly the building played chess with the darkness;
in the end, there was no king,
and a moon rose over the deserted CBD,
and the heartless centre of the city
waited for the heart of a new glance to begin beating.

It was the summer of the adjective.
It was a dead letter box. And it was honey.
The wall was a pastel yellow, and the mirror
a Venetian. Thinking of a poem (Narcissus),
I held up the little word 'end'
as if with a pair of delicate tweezers.
She called to him to come to bed, put off the tv.
Images floated like lillies. He kissed her goodnight.
It's going to rain, she said, but it stayed dry
and our world seemed to stop breathing.
There wasn't much between our lips.
Somewhere, the storm held us, suspended, but in the way
mirrors hold faces they will never touch.

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2002.