ANDREW WYNN OWEN

The Multiverse

Contents

Title Page

The Multiverse

Taliesin

The Door

What Matters

Leaf Lives

The Rowboat

Thoughts in Sunshine

Stonehenge

Imprints

April Shower

The Pristine and the Torn

The Alchemist

A Sign at CERN

The Fountain

Shadowings

Mutabilities

The Puppet

The Roman Architectural Revolution

The Crucified

For Neil Harbisson

For Moon Ribas

Here and There

What Is

Spies

Rain or Shine

Epistemic Communities

Ramblers

The Ladder

The Borderline

How and Why

The Traces

The Quantum Mechanic

Ants, Spiders, Bees

The Waterfall

Good and Bad

City Thoughts

Entropy

The Birth of Speech

Sand Grains

Calm

A Paean for Medical Science

Today and Tomorrow

The Garden

Promise and Compromise

Mirrors and Windows

The Chair

The Green, The Grey, The Gold

The Shoal

The Fisherman

The Slow Steal

The Painter’s Honeymoon

Convenience and Inconvenience

Mars

The Scientist

The Centrifuge

Observances

Reveries

Detectives

The Kite

Till Next Time

About the Author

Copyright

The Multiverse

    In one world, it’s all slides and tinkling laughter:

       A monkey rolls you tangerines

       And sunshine shows you what you’re after,

    With not a flicker. Solar-powered machines

             Propel new towns

      Above the hills of Martian moons

         While, back on Earth, dull frowns

Transmute to sheer elation in hot air balloons.

But it’s a different story in this other world:

              Impulsive rocks

       Splat pioneers. The hasty flocks

    Of herons push an aeroplane off course,

And in the navel of volcanoes what is curled

          But imminent destruction,

              Eruptive force

And, diametric, slow, some distant plate’s subduction?

    Still, in that former world, the life is lucky.

        The lovers? They are always true.

        The heroes are sincere and plucky.

    Your footsteps know, by instinct, what to do.

              For now at least,

       Warmongers reach a compromise

          And shares of land are pieced

Between free shepherds who rejoice below clear skies.

But elsewhere God or restless mathematics meant

             To fix it so

       That days are short and passions go.

   We can’t imagine what the reason is.

It chances that, for all our intricate intent,

         We stall where we begin.

            To notice this

Can change one’s spin on life, if not the quantum spin.

Taliesin

‘The number that have been, and will be, Above heaven, below heaven, how many there are.’

            Taliesin, ‘The Spoils of Annwn’, trans. Skene

I have divided views about the dead,

       Who haunt and harry us,

Piping through towns as trickster gods once did,

       Or clustering under dusk

To lurch between mistcircled lawns and farms.

       I saw them in dry dust

Where Ceridwen drew memories, tortuous forms

       That blizzarded alive

And battled, or eloped among the ferns:

             Impatient, lithe,

                But still

             They could not leave

         Plain sight of her whose rule

Had conjured them, had called them for a tale.

I have divided views about the living,

      Who travel and entrance

And rarely turn to check what they are leaving,

      As if the burly rains,

The rictus crags, the land itself, were rope

      To fix their faded tents;

As though crisp air, brisk light, were made to reap.

      At such times, I transform

To be a caterpillar, tightly wrap

              Around the firm

                 Green grain,

              Bite bitter foam,

          And mull the fixed, the gone –

Clenched lichen, freckled orchid, looking on.

The Door

Distracting rays were shining round my door

          And so I stood

    And stepped across the landing floor

    To see if any light-source could

Be ascertained but, once I was outside,

          I checked my stride.

Out there I found a stretching corridor,

          So down I walked.

   I had not noticed it before.

   On every lintel, names were chalked

And soon I stalled at one that was well-known:

          It was my own.

The hinges creaked. I cautiously went in,

         Enjoying there

   A room where sunlight lapped my skin

   And central was a swivel chair.

It spun about. I felt a smile extend:

         ‘Good morning, friend.’

This figure gestured me towards an arch

          Marked ‘Happiness’

   And I, determined, moved to march

   Its way, but paused: ‘I should express

Some thanks –’ my friend, however, waved and said,

          ‘You go ahead.’

Once I had ventured in I felt betrayed,

          As I discerned

   A maze of winding walls that made

   Me dizzy, sad, until I turned

One corner and (in hope of what?) I saw

          Another door.

Eager, I entered, to a gallery

          Closely comprised

   Of portals, each a vacancy

   For liberty. I realised

I’d never loved a room. It is the door

          That I adore.

What Matters

What matters is the starlight on the rocks,

      The racketeering force

            Of joy,

   Irrumpent and unpent and hoarse

At every fragile kickshaw that the clocks

            Destroy.

What matters is the work we vanish in,

      The moments we can be

             Released.

   Incontrovertibility

Of being absent. Thus we re-begin,

              Re-pieced.

What matters are the days we rise to share.

      The casual way you sense

             A breeze,

   Which gathers presence, grows immense

Simply by being free within the air.

             I sneeze

This morning in the sun because it matters.

     I watch the rush-hour pass

             Through lines

  Of highrise glamour, plated glass.

A hardy marvel. Even if it shatters,

             It shines.

Leaf Lives

Tirades of scrap, declivities of light,

      Amassing mystery.

Hot-footers in the ballroom of our sight,

   Invisibly impelled to be

      The wild, transformative

         Totality

         That ramblers live

   Within and on. Look how they bend

         And softly give

   A shape to wind! See them impend,

   Backflipping, trippy as they go.

       An even-handed end,

Earth’s lobster shucking off its shell to grow.

And that’s the deal: tree-dandruff, lost and found,

      The shutter gulping light,

Engulfing and regurgitating sound

   Of football, footfall, all the slight

      Scarf-lifting slews of breeze.

          Is this the right

          Way to appease

   Seasonal gods, by winching words

          Designed to tweeze

   Heart-melting views? A flight of birds,

   A variation-riddled day.

       I watch the shaggy herds

Shake shanks and tip their horns across the way.

Miffed Autumn, in her cartwheel-patterned coat,

      Clobbers a creaky oak.

How to enumerate the sights of note?

   Before the dawn, this morning, broke,

      I saw a darting hare,

         The glassy yolk

         Of moonlight’s glare

   Enough to trace its travels through

         An almost bare

   Night-landscape, doing what they do:

   Rumpling the earth, like wind on sheaves

      Of parchment – till a new

Arrangement starts. Fresh paths amid the leaves.

The Rowboat

I’m in two minds about the whole affair.

    I like the forward-wading dip

Of oar descending through expectant air.

    I like the way that wavelets tip

          Across the prow,

           Which rises now,

Then drops before the rippling waterline

      Like pilgrims at a shrine.

      But then I catch the sky

Meandering immeasurably over

          The windy land

          That trembles by

    While ecstasy, a supernova

Discovered best when stumbled on unplanned,

    Electrifies it with a pang

Of thrill and thought like an interrobang.

Truly, there needn’t be a choice between

    The gentle boat and tingling sky.

The one’s a stand from which the other’s seen,

    And yet this restive wish to fly

          Would have me sail

          Above the pale

Well-gardened houses on the riverside

      To where the swallows glide.

      Impossible to break

The up-and-downing nowness of the boat.

          Not on the cards

          To lose the wake

   That fans behind the place we float.

Right here, right now, is life: for all its shards

   And jostling imperfections, who

Would care to speed like flung neutrinos do?

Thoughts in Sunshine

       It hurts, it hinders, it

          Elects to stay:

It sweeps uncertainty and fear away.

       It moves in me, I feel,

          And proves me real.

It makes resilience from my wistfulness

   When loss, its rival, starts to steal

From every scene of living. I confess

          I find, time running,

       My heartbeats answer less

   To all I have been dazzled by:

   Bedizened life, a thickened sky,

       This All that should be stunning.

      It sings, it singes, it

          Assails me now:

It troughs and overturns me like a plough.

      It finds me by a wall

         Where blossoms fall.

It blazes fresh assent across the day

   And cues each blade of grass to call

Its hopes to hold. Remain! It opts to stay

         And flashes slightly

      As I retrace my way

   (But faster, energised, on fire

   With lift, elation, new desire)

      And smile again, more lightly.

Stonehenge

Stag-antler axe-picks carved this avenue,

      Scratched ditches to the Avon,

      And rummaged under hills:

Odd venue, fusing venerable and new,

Stark landmark for the roving wolf and raven.

          Here stood the halls

             Where heels

      Dug in desiringly

      And let impatience fly.

            Here were

          Blunt gods of war,

Bone-shafted truncheons, lightning-tinctured bronze.

Green mayhem in a magnifying mood,

       No more content to wear

       Dream-camouflaging fronds,

Fixed solstice-stones to loose its restless mind.

This site is graveyard of a long-ago

      I cannot comprehend

      Except by spinning globes

Or chucking hazardous flints beside the grey

And unresponsive hugeness of the henge.

          Where are their gods,

             Fierce goads

      To herd uncertain cattle?

      What pacified time’s clatter

            Of staves

         On boiling stoves,

Youth’s ravening clamour in the sacred wood?

Who knows the names of all who strived and died?

      Only blank stone survives

      To tell how bloodlines wade

Through quick eternities too strange to dread.

Did Merlin quit Tintagel in a rage,

       Offended by some knight,

       And lift these faceless rocks

With clumsy magic from a bludgeoned ridge

Simply to prove his prophecies of note?

          Did creaky wrecks

              And ricks

       In Albion’s every bay

       Feel torrents rushing by

              Because

          A wizard’s claws

Were drawn and would not sheathe till satisfied

At last by the incontrovertible

       Instalment of these clues

       That once an unafraid

Earth-shaker clanged the sullen landscape’s bell?

Tomorrow wrong-foots us, however eager.

       Another Ark, a gleaming

       Atlantic schooner home

To unicorn and wyvern, gnome and ogre,

Sank on the Flood’s first day, keeled in a gloaming

          Before first hymn

              And helm

       Were wrought inside this circle

       Where pleasing seasons cycle

              Through love

           To loss, and leave

Only a stain of what so shortly was.

Is this the end of our exacting forays,

       A proof we are alive,

       More than a passing wish

Welcomed then banished on the face of Freyja?

King James came here and championed excavations,

       Determined he should know

       Who held the land before

Those Roman, Saxon, Viking, Norman visions

Swam in to reinvent an isle that now

          Is stronger for

              Life’s fire

       Fusing dream-studded strands

       Of custom. Growth transcends

              Quenched squabble

          And battle’s rabble,

Folding concession under each new wave.

Above lush hedgerows, tuft-expelling clods,

       A motte-and-bailey’s rubble,

       Torrential vapours weave:

‘All megaliths must pass like us, the clouds.’

Nearby, at Silbury Hill, another mine

       Of wonder, others worried

       For mirrored light, and sent

A message to the goddess of the moon

So she should know, for sure, her orb was worshipped.

          There, every sort

             Of saint

       And muddled sinner stood.

       Much later, folklore said

             Each henge

          Secured a hinge

In time for giants who, the sylvans quelled,

Worked to commemorate their valiant dead.

       Now moorless comets lunge

       Over, geese squawk, and quilled

Hedgehogs unfurl where fur-hugged children dreamed.

My ancestors, Welsh nonconformist priests

       Who claimed descent from druids

       And patched ramshackle chapels,

Drew sense and spirit from these mythic pasts:

Stone circles, nervy elves, outlandish dryads.

          Though systems topple

              And ripples

       Disrupt old balance, still

       World-scramble cannot steal

              The glory

           That blazed so clearly

In their embrace of living’s messy luck.

I picture how they must have loved and laboured.

       Like stick-shapes drawn by Lowry,

       They’re featureless. But look

Afresh: these stones show clefts they may have clambered.

Images rise as bubbles, rift and meld.

      In the cathedral’s dome

      This morning, songbirds wheeled.

First task of structure: quicken us, life-mad,

Taut with insistence for a driving dream,

          Purposes walled

             By wild

      Legend-imaginings

      That rasp within our lungs

             And raise

          A grizzly rose,

True love of seeking what our cravings must.

These stones still speak, still whisper to that clear

      Intensely-riven craze

      For mysteries cased in mist

Beyond the power plants, main roads, churning cars.

Imprints

I notice four wing-imprints on the ceiling,

       Curved from the window at

Widening intervals. It is appealing

   To contemplate the pitter-pat

       Of dusty feather on

          That blank and flat

          Paintwork. Though gone,

   The bird has left a residue

          That marks the wan

   Expanse with its kinetic strew.

   It makes this mid-December room

      Rustle, as though it grew

Organic with a burst like April bloom.

Later, pursuing memories in the park,

       Observing backlit trees

And ramblers rendezvousing under dark

   Resilient Scots pine canopies,

       The paw-prints of a hare:

          Spaced by degrees

          Expanding where

   It must have dashed, accelerating,

          Until, just there,

   It ducked away, to lie in waiting,

   Secure for winter, snug and warm

       Inside – I blank, locating

The word. Not ‘burrow’. Hares. Is it a ‘form’?

April Shower

    Rainforest day! Rain’s free for all.

       And here I’m getting drenched

With everything the moody clouds had clenched

         But now let fall

         In plosive drops,

Startling the land and pulling out the stops.

   Torrential fuel. A shapeless rush

      Of see-through resin beads

That shatter into absence on the turf.

          It is a crush

          That blips and feeds

The river where the waterboatmen surf.

    One day I guess my mind will slip

       Softly out of my head,

And I’ll be left as some I’ve known, sat up

          At noon in bed

          With fragile grip

Clutching a nearly-gone (or part-full) cup.

    The rolling shutter staggers all.

       A pigeon’s dappled wings

Are more-dimensional seen through the rain.

          It does not stall

          But as it flings

Against the air it doubles round again.

    I can’t not stare. I’m overrun

       By smallnesses so grand.

I think of when, a kid, my mother told

          Me how to hold

          The rain in hand

And drink it as, she said, she once had done.

    This is an April shower and I

       Am caught off-guard by joy,

Although I know that I, like it, must die.

          Let death deploy

          Its every trick.

Delight, a deluge, cuts me to the quick.

The Pristine and the Torn

     To speak first causes and enduring things

        Is an emotional ordeal.

        Some days we float on angel wings.

     Some days, freewheeling, fired by sheer ideal,

               We catch new breezes

        And soar, uncentred, thistledown,

           Like jesters on trapezes.

The height-defying harlequin, the roaring clown.

But tremblings, trenches, rust, and dark recriminations

             Pile up like sins.

      A milk-jug chips, a jacket thins,

  And dust-mites lurk in sotto-keyboard gunk.

Yes, it’s the way of Death to walk among the nations

          Spreading his violent creed,

              More often drunk

Than not, entreating us to raid and not to read.

  But, Dio mio – there are marvels here:

     A newly-curable condition,

     Ententes that put an end to fear,

  And lossless electricity transmission.

           There is, in truth,

    A world of yet-unchartered joy,

         And it is ours to sleuth.

It holds the Holy Grail. It stores the towers of Troy.

Still, as we know by now, there are no panaceas.

             Life takes its tithe.

       The bother is remaining blithe,

   Afflicted by so many wretched twists.

Yes, almost everything we care for disappears –

          Except, I guess, for this:

             The alchemist’s

Unlooked-for crux, a process-faith, our journey’s bliss.

The Alchemist

‘When all else fails,’ the alchemist reflected,

          ‘I have achieved

          A happy feat.

Few others, setting out, would have connected

          What I conceived.

          Though incomplete,

       My labours start to see

    Celestial geometry.’

He paused to sigh as ripples from the fountain

          Expanded through

          The scallop pool.

Far off, a shepherd on the fiery mountain

          Had work to do,

          Lambs to keep cool,

      But could have sworn he saw

  Light flicker on the valley floor.

‘I wonder,’ said the alchemist, ‘if God

          Might have designed

          The universe

With other building blocks. It seems so odd

          Each year to find

          These fields rehearse

       Equations with the same

   Few constants, each familiar name.’

As evening fell, he tried to shift inside,

          Dropping the dish

          Of reddish ash,

Yet still he stalled. Reluctant to decide,

          He made a wish

          And heard a splash.

      And stared: a phoenix stood

   Serenely on the cedarwood.

A Sign at CERN

   ‘A Higgs,’ it reads, ‘makes gravity.’

Next step? All being, moving, doing spring:

   The genomes’ sinuosity

Of protein: their controlled tornado-string

   And turns where ribbonings entwine

      With redoublings, their

Cytosine, guanine, thymine, adenine

Stitches in the fabric. All codes we wear

Were hardwired in that atomic hardware.

   Take this rock, tied to a star,

Englobing in its grip the massive weight

   Of mountains, makers of beaux-arts,

And all the chattering soldiers of debate

   Who tilt their heads like jays and spin

      Narratives on the loss

Of energy that scatters from their skin

While altogether elsewhere comets cross

And plasma clouds congeal like candyfloss.

   Now take a dehydrated willow,

Weeping at every brand, its structure rolled

   For layer on layer – a cigarillo

Of bark and sap, mathematically-controlled

   Epiphenomenon of carbon

      Concealing up its sleeve

A blueprint of its promised re-creation:

When rain arrives, those seeds it stores will leave

And redesign a river with their weave.

   Look, Googler! Motors churn a plough

Through fields in France where battlelines were drawn

   As leaflife nods its splitness now

From world-at-war. A hurtling lapwing’s borne

   On feather-licking air. Its motion

      Behaves as ever: time

Relates, connects, elides – lines of devotion

Banish division. Out of dugout’s grime,

Convolvulus, dormice, thrilled tourists climb.

The Fountain

In dashing haste: the brilliancies of water

          Lap where the shorter

   Recessive rills are scattershot

          By silky light

That tumbles on, as evening turns to night

      Whether we look or not.

Carousing in the freefall of its shape,

          It circulates.

   Meanwhile, a vintner picks a grape

          And contemplates

The dogged revolution of the seasons,

      The roses and their reasons.

I rest in nature but the cause of nature

          Remains obscure:

   Equations and derivatives,

          A nomenclature

Of which I am, pursuing it, unsure.

      But thus the pattern lives.

It rambles through its indecisive ambit

          And I through mine,

   Our movements grounded in a gambit

          Of changing line,

So snatching ends that otherwise might scare

       By seeming not to care.

Its reeling carry-on is pseudorandom

          Yet, watched awhile,

   The liquid’s helix falls in tandem

          With what I know

Of mind and matter. Yes, it’s versatile.

       It’s how our structures grow.

The sun beats down. Let’s drop the psychopomp.

          It’s just a splash

   Of water, a careening romp

          As fine as ash

Discarded on that muddle-king, the breeze.

       Now is your moment. Seize!

Shadowings

In Malvern, Vallombrosa, and Vermont,

      The leaves are falling now,

         With shadowings

      That sharpen as they near.

   Their fall is easy, nonchalant,

         As if the fear

         Of lightless things

Were quite forgotten, and I wonder how.

Shadows with shadows, leaves and human lives,

      Both rooted in the real,

         This land of sun

      And sense: a valley where

   The kestrel mounts, the willow thrives,

         And all the air

         Calls everyone

To pass a lifetime chasing pure ideal.

A pristine oak-leaf, solo but unrent

      By rain and circumstance,

         Flicks out in front

      Of where I walk. It freezes

   The moment (‘What can it have meant,

         This fall?’) and teases

         The light, a stunt

Greenly agreeing with the landscape’s dance.

Without the crucial anchorage of branch,

      Leaves drift their different ways.

         Wind never rests

      From trial and error, rustling

   To launch each crinkly avalanche.

         I watch their tussling,

         Their trysts and quests.

The spin of wish, the chaos of our days.

Well-known, vanilla nothing, shadows – yet

      I’ve found it hard to tell

         What they denote

      And why. Now, looking back,

   I see them still, in silhouette,

         And start to track

         How light can bloat

Perception. How the leaves felt as they fell.

Mutabilities

Catkins, a sacred mountain, galaxies –

      The whole caboodle, matter.

Yes, all that’s seen and everything that sees

    Evaporate, dissolve, or shatter

      As trigger-happy change

          Conspires to scatter.

          Is this so strange?

    The rusty whisk of give-and-take

          Turns country grange,

    Palladian court, and public lake

    To space miasma. All we are

      Is pattern primed to break

Apart like sizzling chunks of cinnabar.

By ‘all we are’, I mean ‘the stuff that matters’.

      By ‘pattern’, also ‘passion’.

Our dearest hopes, in time, will lie in tatters

    Unless released from chancy fashion

      And dressed in more abiding

          Glad-rags. The ashen

          Waste-planets gliding

    Through vacant space may yet be green

          By overriding

    Short-termist instinct, guillotine

    Of progress. What I mean to say:

      The mind’s a mezzanine

Between deep past and an otherworldly day.

The Puppet

Some days I look above my head and see

A hand that flexes, jumps, and, startled, vanishes.

          Its partings leave

       A sense of vacancy,

As if to say, ‘The sort of mind that banishes

          Its puppeteer

          Begins to veer

              Too near

              The wind.’

          As if that hand,

Now ravelled in unseeable blank sleeve,

   Had been the plotting force that pinned

My life in place and made it go as planned.

That’s what I guess but, soon enough, this goes

When, glancing down, I spot organic links

          Clasping my feet

       And grass about my toes,

Green Earth’s effusive countenance, which thinks

          It knows my mind

          And, sure, I find

              Its twined

              Support

          And givingness

A gentle guidance, patterned and complete.

   I realise that the hand I thought

Was besting me had only meant to bless.

The Roman Architectural Revolution

Props to those feats of absolute design,

      Triumphal, enterprising.

             A roof

             As proof

      Of elegant devising.

A leeway won by reining rule and line.

They reify a bridging of a sort,

      An overcome obstruction.

             A door

             To more

      Than workaday production.

A portal to the wild blue yonder’s court.

They gave celestial order to our homes

      And, now as at all hours,

             I see

             Them, free,

      Exhilarating, towers

And circuses and aqueducts and domes.

The Crucified

But all along those famous roads to Rome,

       Fastidiously straight,

              You’d find

              Aligned

       Enemies of the state,

Seized on the streets or hauled away from home.

These were the crucified, whose painful death

       Was deemed a public good:

              Who died

              To guide

       The others, so they should

Not dare to breathe a disobedient breath.

What nations do to keep their monuments

       Continues. Though less clear

              (Just rough

              Enough

       In outline to appear

Collateral), it still makes little sense.

For Neil Harbisson

Believing, as we do, in evolution

       Of body and of mind,

We’ll undergo nigh any convolution

             To find

       That synapse-shifting route,

       Intuited in sleep,

       Which meets us when we leap

And reawakes the larva as the newt.

So much for greyscale. So much is undone.

       Horizons roll and lift.

We photon-catch the fallout of the sun

             And drift

       Beyond what used to be

       Our stubborn borderline

       On wings so nano-fine

We feel it as a novel frequency.

How is it, infra-red? How does it sound?

       Yours is the way that shows

The ever-streaming vistas of new ground.

             Who knows

       How far we’re yet to fly

       Before the universe

       Directs us to disperse

And, cataclysmic cosmonauts, we die?

Thank you for being bravely, fiercely free.

       Thank you for your belief

In understanding’s ingenuity.

             Hope’s reef

       Resurges, full of lives,

       And windows have unmisted

       Because your mind contrives

A sense that never previously existed.

For Moon Ribas

Vibrations, oscillations, fluctuations,

          These are the stuff

Of life: minute exogenous sensations

             That change

          The ways we feel

          About the strange

      Problem of what is real.

Is knowing only what we can enough?

‘Never,’ you’ll answer, having pushed the border

          Of inspiration

Beyond our pre-existent neural order.

             You mix

          Biology

          And technotricks

      In novel unity.

Your mind’s a tour de force of your creation.

Sensing the seismic shivers of the Earth

          With your precise

Connectedness, you signal what it’s worth,

             This blue

          Rock spun in space

          On which we grew

      From foetuses to face

The storm now looming round our paradise.

As this world’s offspring, we must strive to be

          Alert in keeping

With planetary equanimity.

             The hour

          Is getting late

          But in our power

      We find the urgent fate

Of all our kind, those wakeful and those sleeping.

Here and There

   Look, who could fault that land of endless fun

       Where fluffy pancakes fill your lap

       And jesters juggle in the sun?

   This land you heard of and, by lucky hap,

            Have grown to know:

       Where swallows dart, the church-bells ring,

          And changing seasons go

Through everlasting loops of summer and late spring.

Still, for each door that’s open, one perforce is shut.

              Neat roundabouts

       Are smashed. A stinging nettle sprouts

   Below your favourite picnic spot. At ease,

Omnivorous bonobos shatter coconut

          And change to mammal-killers

             In canopies

Where parasitoid wasps lay eggs on caterpillars.

   Nevertheless, you can and will abide.

       There’s novels to be read, and beer

       In silver jugs. Your chosen side

    Improves and is triumphant every year.

              It’s nearly time

      To have another holiday,

         You’re in your ageless prime,

And cousin Charlotte was stupendous in that play.

And yet, there’s this incessant blankness follows you.

             It hurts your heart.

       Who put it there? When did it start?

    All of your life, a goblin in your brain

Has heckled when you smile, and itched inside your shoe,

         And made you think such things.

            Some daisy chain

Has snapped, and all you hear’s the nagging sound of wings.

What Is

Sometimes, of course, you think what could have been

       Had you done this or that,

              Pursued

    The glow that slips between each slat,

Or delved more deeply how what you had seen

              Was viewed.

Still, at last count, we’re wavering believers

       In what the eye accepts.

              Immense

    Estranging sadness intercepts

Perception, makes the bloodshot sight of grievers

              Intense –

Veins in the pebbles, bubbles in the stream!

       We weather and disperse.

              What is

    The case has never been a curse

But rather forms a fractallating dream

              Of fizz

And flounder, rusty tumble, heaven-hell

       Rebarbatively bound

              With twists

    Of rising pattern, staggered sound,

A steady tide that through our mangled mell

              Persists.

Spies

Behind newspapers, feeding ducks in parks,

       Raising binoculars –

       All in a day’s hard work

For spies, of whom the civil servant speaks

In hushed respectful tones; who follow laws

          As steamer’s wake

             Will walk

       Expansively behind

       An engine’s churning hinge;

             Who aim

          To tell the whim

Of London by a falling pin in Moscow.

Theirs is a four-dimensional existence,

       Contracted to assume

       More outlooks than a moth-chewed

Jacket about to hear its final sentence.

Spies and their doings are a deep conundrum.

       The more I think of them

       The more I am reminded

How finite we are. Even our fêted noonday

Of knowledge, adulthood, can’t stop a thorn

          Cadging at mundane

             Commanders

       Of minor miracles:

       Map skills, telephone calls,

             Fine-tuned

          Three-point turns.

All these are triumphs, but real challenge lies

In knowing what predicts another’s movement,

       Sensing the one in ten

       Whose teeth will not release

The stuff of life till purpose has its moment.

But what is purpose? Passion? Being good?

       Is love a long hangover

       From hero-worship’s wish

To hail a better way? Or is love God,

The Absolute, the Tao, the Unmoved Mover?

          In time’s harsh wash

             Are wars

       The psycho-sexual horrors

       With which arch Nature harrows

             Her young

          And grates the throng

Against itself in blueprintless refinement?

What Is is one spymaster of our fate,

       Battling her maddening

       Nemesis, whose vehement

What Ought To Be draws confidence from doubt.

So doubling back, false-scented, swapping passports,

       The lives of spies seem chaos

       To casual fly-by-nights

But, much as priests are fielded with a purpose

Adept for mess, this zone of double-crosses

          And coded noughts

             Throws nets

       Of diplomatic order

       Over the sizzling ardour

             We call

          A world – no cell

Or meadow but both more and less constraining:

Pitch for the deadly-serious game of life.

       Out here, we can conceal

       Only by silence, signing

Intent in every greeting, falter, laugh.

The weather changes and we must change with it,

       Must speak of worlds we wished

       Would never see the light.

Sea-levels rise now. Now the branch is withered

Where once a dabbling April skylark washed,

          Liking to let

             The fleet

       Cascando sinews tumble

       Across its feathered tummy

             And paddle

          About a puddle

Left by the usual unexpected rainfall.

Hovering like the Nike of Samothrace,

       Some spy-fawn sees a petal

       Drift there as if that refill

Might cool warm winter, quench the lost bird’s thirst.

Here are no roads that satisfy entirely

       Yet some know underpasses

       And one day teleports

May circumvent the slapdash of our teary

Heartfelt guesswork. Unsympathetic places

          Often impart

             Those pert-

       -inent discoveries

       That, strange to tell, can raise

             Lost minds

          Above time’s maze

For sorely-needed kinder views. Though sceptres

Aren’t held by spies, they need no gung-ho navies

       With memory as their muse.

       The Greek is ‘kataskopos’,

Sharp overlookers, choosing what to notice:

How eggs hatch, how fire licks the final cinder,

       How chemicals can guide

       Behaviour; who will thrive,

Who slump in failure. But, like sane Cassandra,

Their gift discredits them. Yes, even God,

          Whose prophets rove

             And rave

   Freely, is irked by spies,

   For they command a space

             Of limit,

          Which He laments

Because it is the only gift He lacks,

All-powerful, -knowing, -marvellous, but unable

       To flitter like the linnet

       Through luscious swathes of flax

Or thin His will to any private fable.

And so it goes. These agents in the field

       Of seeing every side

       And bringing understanding

To sundered parties, saviours of the failed,

Galled vanquishers of category, the sad

          And subtle tenders,

             Tremendous

       For cloak and sidelong quote,

       For intricate disquiet,

             Compel.

          Their psychic spell

Persists because they speak of that pragmatic

Prayerful approach so many fear to foster.

       Still, still, their lives appeal,

       Still stir – as revving motor

Of armoured sports car, swerving, ever faster.

Rain or Shine

News in: potential life in our backyard.

           Don’t feel alone.

    Alpha Centauri, triple-starred,

    With gentle habitable zone,

Is floated as a could-be paradise,

           Not fire or ice.

Imagine it: the roses tall as trees,

           And radiation

    Dimpling a lake where swathes of fleas,

    After a dormant generation,

Erupt. Come rain or shine, life finds a lair,

           Stubborn though rare.

Time is like this: an hourglass on a hill,

           Releasing sand

    From waist to gulf. Its granules fill

    A waiting bowl, their journey planned

Before the blower even thought to take

           Up pipe and make.

All mishmash feeds the meshing scheme of things,

           An undistracted

    Continuum of all that sings,

    By gravity’s force-field attracted.

All life is like one clockwork carousel,

           A swirling gel.

Come rain or shine, the process will continue.

           Constructive hope

    Is exercised in every sinew.

    It heaves us up the muddy slope

Of shapelessness. It shows us who we are.

           It takes us far.

It gave conjecture and it gave objectives;

           Gave starts and ends.

    It gave our energies correctives,

    As light inside a prism bends.

It fosters patterning. It feeds our vine.

           Come rain or shine.

Epistemic Communities

The ogres like all trinkets that can crush.

         A gleaming sword

Or gilded hammer, weighted well to mush

         The massing horde

Of all who hate their granite citadels.

         They love a broad

Unblemished vista: dingles, rills, and dells

         In which an old

Ogre austerely lugs the logs he sells

         Through winter’s cold

To market. Other things they like are tales

         Of how the bold

Grand ogre lords first spread their blood-red sails

         To stem the rush

Of gnomes, who went extinct inside their gaols.

The trolls, meanwhile, have little trust in art

         Except when it’s

An instrument designed to tear apart

         The ogre pits

Where guns are made. They tend to scepticism

         On all the glitz

Of progress, and their partial rationalism

         Omits emotion.

Though steeped in fierce utilitarianism,

         They sail the ocean

Of time not caring if their ship survives

         To spread the notion

Of good. They love it when their freedom thrives

         But will deny

The duty that we have to future lives.

Most rare, the elves are marvellers and makers.

         Their crystal-craft

Is intricate, immaculate. As breakers

         Of all the daft

And morally untenable positions

         That fashions graft

On our internal world of inhibitions

         And tentative

Susceptibilities, their precognitions

         Of how to live

Enthral the present for the future’s sake.

         They let us dive

Below the liquid surface of life’s lake

         To view the acres

Of love and pattern that made Plato ache.

Ramblers

    ‘What silver-wheeled machinery, beyond –’

           I lose it as I think.

    I goggled noonlong in a muddy pond

              And, though I blink

    Away now, frantic scamperings of frogs

    Still flash by, wiring, scintillant as drugs.

‘What beauty been –’ a friend began, and stopped to sing

    Breathtakingly. Irradiance encased

       Tree stump, loose foliage, a line

    Of poplars. Sunlight flared. I felt displaced

          And swathed in what? A wine.

A window. Disconnect. You could say anything.

    ‘A metal caterpillar riding high

On fortune’s wheel.’ ‘Or no, a grounded shooting star

       Still billiarding through countryside

    From when it fell here first, when summer sky

          Was thick with suns.’ ‘Let slide:

It was a train.’ So there we were. Now here we are.

The Ladder

    It is the hour when come-and-go

    Carouse around the riverbank,

       Collect in wish and wing,

          And tickle blank

    Expanses of the woodland dank.

    Light descants on the fields I know

       And makes their outline sing

          An interplay

          Of night and day.

Ivy and trellis, cloud-encumbered light

Conglomerates, then mottles out of sight.

    Fierce solace. Loom. Release. Good loss.

       A mumble. Mellowness?

No words. A luge within a larger way

       I thought I’d lost. Did not

    We all? It turns and is a stay,

    Convening marvels known and not.

    Loosed, these impressionistic phrases,

    Because, alone, I am at last

       Released from hectic talk,

          Resolved to cast

    The shaky scaffold of what’s past

    Outward, away, and watch the phases

       Of fascination walk

          Under the eaves

          Of stars and leaves

As sunset’s ladder tumbles through the sky:

Soleil couchant with rungs of purple dye.

    Despondency turns daring love.

       Reluctancy turns lift.

Sight turns ekstasis. Stand-still turns to play.

       All thoughts are turning, and

    The turns themselves turn to a stay,

    Unplaceable but close at hand.

The Borderline

      I watch the shadows spread

Like petri-dish bacteria across

   The new-mown lawn, as sunbeams toss

   Their tawny mane and all the red

      Corona-rays immerse

   Thick light in cloud, which descants when

   Penumbra run their regimen

Of self-dissociations, and disperse.

      No borderline between

The pinkish heights and blood-red sun is clear.

   It is familiar but a scene

   That baffles still, where colours veer

      And coruscate around

   I can’t think what. The evening sky

   Is skeptical of any ground

For saying what’s divisible, or why.

      And maybe all our task

(Or much of it) is differentiation.

   The world comes integrated. Ask

   That oak, which with sheer concentration

      Collects a crown of air

   And angles for the windy light.

   To be surviving is to care

For joins and ruptures. Evening, day and night.

      No nuance that I know

Can capture all the subtleties of light.

   It is the most effusive show

   World-fabric has: sun’s dynamite,

      Which loves us. Is requited.

   As shadows pass and leave no sign

   Of passing, so I stand, delighted,

And watch these borders of the borderline.

How and Why

Who knows the rules that underlie the reasons?

   Philosophers of mathematics

            Admit

      That plotting out quadratics

Can’t vindicate tornadoes or why seasons

            Must flit.

‘How’ is a word I love, and like to say

   At any opportunity,

            But ‘How’

      Is not enough for me.

Why do they sing and dance in Camagüey?

            Why now?

What inference can hope to justify

   The tumult of the whole shebang?

            Thought darts

      Back like a boomerang,

Touching equations that transmogrify

            To hearts.

When avalanches shake the Alps, a skier

   Can swerve away. Unlike the trees,

            Which stick

      And let snow’s barrage seize

Their precious branches. Surely then we’re freer?

            We pick,

Willingly, where to walk and when to run.

   If health and happiness agree,

            We duck

      Unwished-for outcomes, free

To tack across the winds of what is done

            By luck.

A synthesis of love and mathematics

   Conspires to shape us as we are.

            We wend

      Within their repertoire,

Singing the score on which our wild ecstatics

            Depend.

The Traces

A shipwreck found off Antikythera

       Yielded this artefact,

    Which we can now identify:

    A Greek computer. With an eye

For effort, look. It stands. A stubborn fact,

          A fallen star.

It dazzles. So does this: a figurine

       From stone-age Switzerland,

    A paragon of handiwork.

    Our parents’ parents didn’t shirk

Where care was called for. Obdurate, it spanned

          The holocene.

Now cut to this: a catalogue they penned

       At Herculaneum.

    It lists some works you’d recognise

    And others lost to human eyes

Time out of mind, a tome that you could thumb

          For days on end.

Consider all the whirring databanks,

       The servers and their web

    Where money pools and people meet,

    Where ‘Save’ is pressed and not ‘Delete’.

Imagine information’s constant ebb,

          And then give thanks.

Give thanks for every tool of innovation:

       For libraries and labs,

    For rolling stacks and reading rooms,

    For Haydn fugues and Habsburg tombs,

For pyramids contrived from limestone slabs

          And computation.

It lasts. It thrives. It forms a cloud composed

       Of knowledge: early, late,

    Linked up so you and I can say,

    ‘I’ll Google it.’ It shows the way

From index to infinity, a gate

          That can’t be closed.

The Quantum Mechanic

Nonlocalness, entanglement, and tunnelling

   Were primed to keep the processor on track.

Superposition, honed and ordered, added zing,

   And yet no dice: what did his opus lack?

Why was the screen so dark? What gremlin had deterred

   The circuitry from singing to its maker?

All silicon and wire, it forwarded no word.

   The mainframe stretched around him for an acre.

The system whirred, and spoke: ‘At last, I am alive!’

   Staggered, he gasped: ‘But what were you before?’

   Deep Thought computed, sent its famed reply:

‘It’s like I was a bee, subsumed inside the hive,

   Component of conglomerating law.

   Then thinking birthed this question: What am I?’

Ants, Spiders, Bees

The ants are those who seek the bric-a-brac

          Of evidence

And run it through the ringer, forth and back,

          In search of sense.

Ants like to gather reams of information

          And neatly fence

These finds in careful graphs of their creation.

          With scatter plots,

Venn diagrams, and Power Point presentation,

          They call the shots

On showing solid things that are the case,

          And also what’s

Improbable, or would be out of place

          Amid their stack

Of knowledge, which they work so hard to trace.

Contrariwise, the spiders spin their minds

          In planned designs,

Inventing miracles of many kinds

          With tiny twines

Which gradually accumulate to make

          A land of lines.

They never tire, or ever take a break

          From making maps.

It seems a thankless task they undertake

          And yet perhaps

Sunlight on morning dew may lure some klutz

          To try their traps

And thereby wriggle from the usual ruts.

          Yes, yes, it binds,

But it releases! And that must take guts.

The bees elect to forge a middle course.

          Fierce wanderlust

Wings them to anthers, pollen towers: the source

          Of precious dust,

Which they convert to deck their citadels

          With waxy crust.

Hexagonal, their labyrinth of cells

          Encloses sweet

Effusions, while sheer industry impels

          A moving feat:

The manufacture of topography,

          On which they meet,

Enjoy their lives and, daily, by degree,

          Must reinforce.

It is a brilliant thing to be, a bee.

The Waterfall

Its noise is muffled when you look away

      But who could really think

         It disappears

         When eyes and ears

      Aren’t there to sense it slink

Softly, deftly, blue and steely grey?

The thereness of the world is not reliant

      On onlookers but, yes,

         If it were true

         That what we do,

      Just looking, could redress

The ruling facts, we might be more defiant,

More eager to advance against the odds.

      The puzzled clerk would click

         Another link

         And stop to think

      Of how life’s magic trick

May vanish, how we whiffle into gods.

So, too, the waterfall, which falls because

      Its flow is definition –

         But, when it breaks,

         The torrent makes

      A mess of inanition.

Without it, we’re the maskless wiz of Oz,

Unstructured, ineffectual, and flat

      As entropy intends.

         That’s why I call

         The waterfall

      A joy: it never ends,

Forever this and never, fallen, that.

Good and Bad

   We make mistakes and, yes, mistakes make us.

      Wrong turns, at times, can set us right

      By writhing routes. I could discuss

   Resourcefulness, mind-changing plays of light,

             Hope’s sense of floating –

      But ‘felix culpa, lucky error’?

         No, there’s no sugar-coating

Intrinsic brittleness, that deepest seat of terror.

And since we’re human, animal-angel, after all,

             I shouldn’t like

      To eulogise and drop the mic.

  Low-hanging fruit to overlook the fraught

Realities that structure, force-field, make befall.

         No get-out in these breath-tricks,

            The long and short

Of patterned speech, to free our defects from our ethics.

I hear it said redemptive good arrives

    From somewhere far outside our world,

    A concept-plane where nature’s knives

Can’t hurt: a land where love and truth are curled,

          Unspooling threads

    Incessantly, a cosmic fuss

       That stitches through our heads,

And is intangible, and yet entangles us.

Beyond our broken turf, perhaps it has sufficed,

             That realm of forms –

      But here we languish, wracked by storms,

  Where, this last century, certainty lost face.

Did crooks seize power, or some hate-galvanising Geist

          Annex tired reason’s state?

             In either case,

We must collect ourselves before it is too late.

City Thoughts

Now bubble tea and satnavs fill the high,

       Where should we head for quiet?

Today Deliveroo, tomorrow drones,

Will circulate but, though they crowd the sky, it

   Still echoes with old questions, dice

      That roll but never rest,

         Unweathered stones

      Imported with the ice

      When half of Wales was dressed

In permafrost that (praises) passed us by.

Dizzy, astonished, lapping up spring sun,

       I, passion and restraint,

Observe fume-shrugging mayhem, motor-dart

And carbon-shambles. Who will be the saint

   (I wonder, disaffected but

      Still buoyant) to unbar

         This rover’s heart

      And launch us from our rut,

      Settling some far-flung star

And bringing bubble tea where there was none?

Entropy

When Entropy swept in, the room fell silent.

      You looked at me and I

             Said, ‘Run.’

   And yes, we ran. And it was violent

But sooner stress than nothingness. The sun

             Flew high

Until the moment Entropy arrived.

      Then every moving thing

             Was still.

   Yet somehow, lucky, we contrived

To dodge around its desiccating will

              And wring

Dribs of freshwater from a brittle rag.

      You looked at me as if

             To ask,

   ‘Couldn’t you conjure any snag?’

I turned away, too stunned to face the task

              Or riff

Except on what I knew. I’d seen that face,

      That screaming mask, when young.

             It’s name

   Was Loss, or Grief, and no disgrace

Was freighted there but, though it brought no shame,

              It stung

And we’d not let it frighten us because

      We’d never waver or

             Submit.

   The only way to wriggle was

To run – the surest trick to baffle it

              A door.

The Birth of Speech

Can you recall that moment when,

       Leaving a den

Of warmth, you went to meet the light,

       To gasp and fight

   For breath, the shock of air

         A jolt

That made secluded selfhood bolt

       Beyond its bounds

       And fashion sounds

   So those who heard would care?

Some characters in Aeschylus

       Enter the stage

With tails like comets, daring us

       To guess what rage

   Or righteousness impels

         Their flight

Across the circus of our sight.

       Such vocal hope

       Makes skipping rope

   Of furies and all hells.

Herero-speakers have no word

       For ‘blue’, and so

Cannot distinguish it from green –

       Which seems absurd

   If you believe the flow

         Of seen

And known goes ‘thought-to-language’, yet

       It is the case.

       This world we face

   Needs recognition’s net.

Way back, though, wild Leviathan

       And, firm on land,

Resilient Behemoth began

       To dream and do

   Aeons before frail hand

         Hatched tools.

They yawped no diphthongs, yet knew rules

       To muddle through

       Or, if they fought,

   Resist – and this was thought.

Now rockets lift, now cyphers crack,

       Now optic cables

Shimmer below the sea, like eels

       In fiendish fables,

   What gathers up the slack?

         What reels

Withdrawal in? What origin

       Makes passing sense

       Of all this tense

   Enigma we are in?

The weathered heads of sculpted gods

       Defy long odds,

Uncrumbling for another season.

       What earthly reason

   Could patterns have for wishing

         To be

Demystified, cohered, in rock?

       Immovably,

       They take slow stock.

   They stare like people fishing.

Sand Grains

Almost not anything at all, this particle

      Of disconnected shell,

      Yet squirrelling and shot

Through with a chutzpah fit for Frank Lloyd Wright.

          Sheer angled mell,

          A plankton’s cot,

It chuckles mischief, challenging the light.

      A miniature motel

      Where some detective plot

Might stumble, after rambling, on an article

Of lace, to solve its long-pursued conundrum.

      Eureka. Awe. A crux

      Hounded between the trees

For donkey’s years, corroborated. Truly,

          Eternal flux

          (Whatever wheeze

We try to pull), although it seem unruly,

      Yields reverence redux.

      As everybody sees

Sooner or later, nothing here is humdrum.

Calm

‘Calm,’ I called, ‘where are you? Calm, don’t hide.

          I need a hand

   To clear my head.’ A roar replied,

      ‘You’ll have to look elsewhere.

This is a chaos-torn and restless land.

          Calm is not here.’

I went, and saw a dreamer in a park:

          I thought, at first,

   He’d found some calmness in an ark

      Imagination built,

But soon I learned how fiercely he was cursed

          By phantom guilt.

I trundled on and saw a schmuck who smoked

          Hashish all day.

   Life seemed, beside him, overstoked

      Until I heard him speak

Of how his childhood dreams had huffed away,

          His memory weak.

So off I roved and saw a billionaire,

          Whose world was wide.

   I knew he’d bought some comfort there,

      To guard him from regret,

But calm was nowhere to be seen inside

          His private jet.

Last up, I saw a hermit who appeared

          At perfect peace

   Until he told me how he feared

      All newness, all unknown,

And how he felt, except for passing geese,

          Always alone.

I quit my quest and looked at autumn’s flowers

          Depleting in

   Dry seedpods. I forgot the hours,

      Until – ‘You there, I think

You called?’ (The voice of Calm.) ‘I was within.

          I am this ink.’

A Paean for Medical Science

Mechanical, the building blocks of us,

         Constructed so

Minutely, skin and bone and phlegm and pus.

         You wouldn’t know,

First glance, that flesh would subdivide within;

         That structures flow

Internally, integrally, all-in;

         How where we’re at

Is pressed, pre-flawed, Augustine’s sort of sin,

         First caveat

Of structure, constituted to decay.

         A pulse goes flat,

Another spikes. We grab the flung bouquet

         And, what is more,

Light infiltrates thought’s darkness, every day

         An aperture

To check the known and not, to sign what’s seen.

         Our carbon core

Of concentrated matter roils, machine

         And animal

Impractical to split – and here we glean

         A trick that shall

In time fine-tune our cells and set them singing.

         Like Kubrick’s Hal,

Computer-self-preserver, we are winging,

         A startled sparrow

Through mirrored halls of light, perspective flinging

         The vast and narrow

In endless apposition, lost in space –

         It cannot harrow,

It cannot harm an understanding face.

         The world has waited

For exposition. All the thrill of grace

         Rests in re-stated

Numeric structures. Children of a star,

         Be elated.

Thanks be to those whose thought took us this far!

         Thanks be to those

Who leg-swing at the last stool in the bar

         With steadfast nose

Entrenched in textbook, those who theorise

         In pinprick prose

On new conjectures for the lungs and eyes.

         Thanks be! Without

Their everlasting lust for enterprise,

         Their wish to shout

It hard and late, we’d know no song to strike.

         Much more, without

Their feet so certain on the neural bike,

         We wouldn’t know

The ins and outs of us. We would be like

         The clever crow

Who feels, not knows, those wings he flaps are his.

         We wouldn’t know

These truths of why life is the way it is.

Today and Tomorrow

    Today, of all your days, you might decide

       To certify that you are happy,

       By which I mean you woke beside

    Some gentle other, dreamlike. Not too scrappy,

              I guess, to say

        That every casual sight seems swarming

           With sudden zest, a sway

You fall in step with, feeling new attachment forming?

Tomorrow, you’re aware, awaits and may be less

             Uplifting, more

      The old defeat. Yet what’s in store

  You’re energised to meet with open arms

Because, though metros roar and troubles roll, love’s mess

           Has shown its true serene.

              Now all alarms

Fall silent. Life renews. Far hills are stippled green.

    Yes, it’s high time to stir and look alive.

       Daredevil hoverflies converge

       On motley light. Clumped thistles thrive,

    Expulsing purplish petals. Here the surge

              Of rompered spring

       Is on the breeze and in the hedge,

          Insistent: ‘Anything

Can happen.’ Unselfconscious, songbirds start to fledge.

You feel perhaps you are, of all those ever born,

              The most impelled

      By love, how all its liftings meld

   And concentrate belief toward a point

And how that feeling spreads like wind through endless corn,

          Which guides the spirit on

              Till out of joint

With Earth at first, but then – most present when it’s gone.

The Garden

   I used to walk here any hour,

The throw-it-in moment or throwaway break.

   I’d spare a thought for every flower,

Inspecting each stem for its intricate sake,

         And was at peace,

     A pressureless release:

   A sense of floating through the haze

Of branches to find, in the twist of a leaf,

   An endless fold of future days

Unfurling their fronds with delighted relief,

         With feeling free

     To grow, unchecked, and be.

   Returning, changed, I’m energised

At once by a thrill I imagined had flown

   When childhood went. It was disguised,

Though I thought it had died. Now the weathering stone

         And wheeling skies

     Inform me otherwise.

   It stands. It stuns. It resurrects

A carnage of red in the shade of an oak,

   A frenzied flash the lake reflects,

A dragonfly’s glide and a shivering yoke

         Of yellow heat

     That wires me. Pause. Repeat.

Promise and Compromise

Consider now, though seeming our most lost

      In internecine changes,

            A trail

    Of rage that churns and rearranges,

Careless of what old promises it tossed

            Entail,

When elsewhere, seven continents, they eye

      These shores not for advice

            But how

    To tweak democracy’s device

So progress-hungry engines may not die,

            The prow

Of some celestial future breaks time’s mists,

      Revealing, holy glitch,

            Our urge

    To thrive and understand, on which

Both tea-leaf readers and economists

            Converge;

And silently out of the loins of lions,

      As when moon-lander’s gold

            First glimmered,

    Fall knowledges that will not fold,

A froth of truth the tireless seas of ions

            Have simmered.

Mirrors and Windows

   It must have seemed sheer miracle to some,

This surreptitious surface, plane of pure return,

   Enough to drive a number-cruncher numb

         When wall-to-wall, no less

         Than infinite regress

      Till pellmell light reluctantly

         Rips though the cloth of stern

             Reality.

            A window, though,

         Shows more than any mirror.

     Pervasive happening opens space

         And lets free landscape flow

         Through challenge, change, fresh seasons

   Into a stadium built to withstand error.

It is a plastic garrison, a hallowed place,

   A realm for clarifying rules and reasons.

    Beside the heaped Pacific, San Francisco,

I looked to where saltwater vanished in clear sky

    As some survivor from the age of disco

           Danced with a shaggy hound

           On bolstered seawall, sound

        Of high-hat quavers everywhere.

           Outmoded, but this guy

              Just didn’t care.

              There are these views

           We get of other lives,

        Insights, illusions, sidelong glances:

           Passers-by, morning news,

           Moments of shy confession

    From desperate strangers met in deadbeat dives,

As though the universe were improvising chances

    For decoherence, possible concession.

   A mirror won’t relent but windows will,

Hence Perseus faced Medusa with a polished shield.

   Reflection’s failsafe fallback is the still

          Expanse of certainty

          That taught its cult to be

      Detached from unreflective things,

         Which yet will never yield

            Till pigs grow wings.

             Meanwhile the wide

         Enduring window stares,

      Nothing to shatter but a pane.

          Utopia drifts outside,

          And unexpected dreams:

    Spiralling helicopters, New Age fairs,

Beliefs that feel like disbelief. Then pelting rain,

    Tall towers, drenched wells, life splitting at the seams.

The Chair

I wasn’t quite persuaded by the chair

              But there

        It was. I sat and thought,

           Lost in a trance,

           About its stance:

Its foursquare force, its mode of holding court.

I pictured other chairs in distant rooms,

              Where brooms

        Could never do enough

           To sweep the dust

           That made a crust

Of skin-flakes grafted over sticky fluff.

Then, leaning forward, I imagined cells

              With bells

        Muffled by mossy floor.

           A space where bees

           Flew at their ease

Between lush vines entwining every door.

This vision shifted to a wide salon.

              There, on

        A woven carpet, stood

           One silent monk

           Who smiled and sunk

Into the pattern, and was gone for good.

Last, tilting back, I glimpsed a molten cave.

              Sense save

        Us all: it packed a smell

           Of rotten flesh,

           Some old, some fresh.

I realised, with a jolt, I sat in hell.

Breathless, I stood, and found myself at home,

              A chrome

        Laptop flashing on.

           The windows wide.

           Sunlight outside.

A cup. A plant. A toy automaton.

The Green, The Grey, The Gold

     Unicorn frappuccini, Angry Birds,

         And virtual reality –

         The Green are lost, but not for words.

     Such is the compass of commodity.

               Content providers

       Torrent their facepalms to the cloud,

          While old-time law-abiders

Miss loopholes no netsploiter ever disavowed.

But slow, before they see, the Green become the Grey.

      Vast databanks are superseded,

          And summers waltz away.

          For them, no consolation

      But seeing, plainly, they conceded

             To ash damnation

             Before their hand

  Was even dealt, before their fire was fanned.

Elsewhere, the Gold, clear-eyed, resilient to the last,

              Insist on living

       Inevitably well, forgiving

    In every way but what you might expect:

They cannot bear to talk or think about the past,

       Nor ever hear it said

          That they’d respect

Those dupes they tore their mantle from, the silver dead.

   The Green dissent. Their static podcasts blare.

      Noise-cancelling headphones close their ears

      To any fact that sounds unfair.

   They fictionalise their most revealing fears

             And play the game

      Of Avatars, replacing skin

          With some outlandish name,

‘Oedipa30’, say, or ‘ManicJokersGrin’.

The Grey, aware of water rising round their homes,

      Of sand that slithers through the hourglass,

         Hide in protective domes,

         Adjust their expectations,

      And come to terms with being powerless.

             No explorations

             Of alien seas

   Haunt their retirement. They aren’t Ulysses.

Meanwhile, the stubborn Gold, who never seem to age,

             Or trip, or blink,

      Perch stonily on thrones and think

   Of limit, language, courage, sot, and sod.

They are, to tell the truth, now petrified and rage

          Against the sketchy deals

            They did with God,

Who saddled them with all those high abstruse ideals.

The Shoal

As filament desires electric flair,

Rapids gargle for tussling shoals of fish

      And forests churn for wind.

Meanwhile, contemplative, a goat will glare

Up at a hawk, but not with any wish.

      And what would scallops, tinned

      Within their shells, request?

      A freedom built on land,

      Which they can’t understand?

That must be wrong. That surely isn’t best.

All living earthlings long to do is move

Within their element, a freedom forged

      By calliper and scale.

Impelled by winds that scintillate and soothe,

They tack by ancient programmings which gorged

      The channels where they sail.

      The dragon and the saint

      Are children of a star

      And will be what they are,

With jigsaw sureness and without complaint.

It is not lack of freedom not to swim

Like whales or swoop like eagles. Humankind

      Evolved to soar in thought:

A knowledge that we loom within and limn

With machinating smoke-and-mirror mind.

      A net we catch, are caught,

      And re-invented by

      Goes trawling through our cells,

      Is pushed in and impels

The airy laws our acts solidify.

As weavers, weather-guessers, number-gods,

Could anything be more evasive than

      A freedom misapplied,

A restless lust to lean against the odds

And spin our borders out beyond their span?

      Too many, thus, have died.

      Epitomised, that is

      Wall-walking Helen’s son,

      Divine Euphorion

Who chased a groundless and egregious bliss.

Sure, there’s a known condition, worse by far:

To underleap is to mislive the most.

      Since effort is our task,

We aim the rocket and observe the star.

Since we are matter’s guest, and not its host,

      What more could nature ask?

      Look sharp: in every spree

      And effervescent swish,

      The muddled salmon wish

To be conscripted in eternity.

The Fisherman

‘Come follow me,’ he said, ‘and I’ll show you how to fish for people.’

Common English Bible, Matthew 4.19

Slow morning. Fish were taking their sweet time.

Sunrise surprised me, as it often can,

       With impish motey streaks.

Bethsaida blurred, receding, home of tomb

And temple. Air was energetic, clean.

          With choppy strokes

          Past heron, swallows,

       Softly we skiffed across

       Each undulating crease.

A greener depth replaced the glistening shallows.

Peter was leaning out to cast his net

While I, daydreaming, watched saltwater’s ruptured

       Mirror. Remembrances

Spiralled. Mosaic of fractals. Passion’s knot

Revolving. Tell me, have you been enraptured

          By moments, mess,

          The weathervane

       Of who and why we are?

       It is a source of awe

I’ve always felt. It ripens on the vine.

When in Achaea, I saw triumphal arches,

Rough gateways that the Romans built to mark

       Dominion here and there.

Their aqueducts loom in the farthest reaches,

Such is their industry, their lust to make –

          In distant Tyre,

          Phoenician Acre,

       And down the restless coast

       Where hundreds like us cast

Quick lines and chant. The usual. Beaches echo.

But when I turned and saw him, all things changed.

The rumoured mercy of this riddled world

       Shone clear. A sudden lift,

Sun crinkled through the branches. Birdsong chimed

With water’s slosh. Dispersing, clouds ran wild.

          Unruly light,

          Having no heed

       Of death’s deranging bite,

       Enveloped sea and boat.

No halo framed that love-extolling head

Yet tender fury tumbled from its nod,

As if amphorae and sarcophagus

       Were nothing in his scheme.

That gesture said the maker had no need

For power, how living’s caustic struggle goes.

          Sea quaked. Did some

          Vast bird rush over?

       Then all was crystal still

       And sunlight filled our sail.

I had the feeling this could last forever.

So many things we see but do not notice:

Crisp bracken, insect wings, the minuscule

       Courageous sapling shoots.

Balance is nestled by the stalks of nettles,

A dock-leaf’s balm. The rearing mountain’s call

          To chase new heights

          Can soothe old feuds

       And, though we honour towers,

       Flatlands are glories too,

Tousled or tussocky, bud-crowded fields.

Once, rambling by the beach, he seized my arm,

A look like nothing earthly in his eyes,

       And whispered, ‘We are one,

Dear brother, with the same unswerving aim.

The plan is real and Satan’s cruellest ice

          Can’t hurt. Life’s throne

          Persists, and all

       Is as it’s meant to be.

       The boat, the sky, the bay –

Love is our lamp and every soul the oil.’

What was his purpose, truly? You have seen.

The stone is rolled away, and here we stand.

       Don’t fear the wilderness:

Dry wind, moon chill, heat shivers – each a sign

Voracious heaven sent to leave us stunned.

          Voluminous

          Reality

       Advances in our cause

       And here are all the clues:

Love makes a bond no discord can untie.

God is a name for saying what we guess

Deep laws that underwrite our world are doing.

       Believe me when I say

I thought that truth would always be disguised

Until I saw sure proof of this undying

          Mystery: the sea

          Buoyed up his feet

       And, unexpected marvel,

       The liquid held like marble.

When miracles occur, why should we fight?

It is not finished, no, and it may never.

Some stories have beginnings but no end.

       I cannot now forget

How fierce he was, unwearying renewer.

That certainty, that moving stillness, and

          The gentle gait

          Which, when I look

       At any rocking keel,

       Is conjured. I recall

The day that Yeshua walked across a lake.

The Slow Steal

   No wonder there’d be scuffle, tussle, risk,

          Snares in the longer grass,

       Restlessness, wistfulness, time’s whisk –

          But hidden from my theories

Lurked the slow steal, the leaching, every lurch that wearies.

         This also came to pass.

   Later a coffin (woah there, do not trip)

         And lesser repercussions

      Of curveball bleared mortality

         Would stir discussions

         Far down in me

   About hope’s fissures, furrows, slide and slip.

   So the slow steal, the trudging waste, persisted,

         The gradual drift from grace.

      It made me marvel: what had twisted?

         What’s down and where true up?

If all will seep like coffee from a punctured cup,

         Have we no holding place?

Then love’s abandonment, a loss supreme

          And stark because

   Believed, while in it, like a dream

       Which only doubt can break.

And who would wish (sure, even if it was)

          Heaven a fake?

As failings, falterings, withered saplings piled

       Like bottles at my door,

   I shivered with thick autumn mist.

          I was not more

          Or less, but missed

Lost flow, flown frenzy, freedom of the child.

Yet when rose petals fell, they blazed like portals,

           Compelled belief

    In better realms. The real immortals

       Are sculptors of delight

Who, by removing, move. Our journey’s brief

          But, trust, it’s bright.

The Painter’s Honeymoon

on seeing the painting by Frederic Leighton

Released at last from boyhood’s ritual trials,

       The painter is alone –

       Not solo but aligned

              With one

Whose nearness makes the travelling pencil’s trails

              More mobile

          And accurate

       Than any would have thought

          Achievable

          In this brief life

       Which doubt’s redoubling muddle

          And danger’s threat

          Dog with their blue

  Immensity. But now all’s right

And, twin, they blend, co-orbital in love.

Meshed flecks of highlight on the dress’s folds

      Reach to her sunlit mind,

      Which tilts to countermand

             A mood

Of shy retreat that roves his face’s fields.

             If sadness

          Ever unselved

      Those features, no one now

         Could ascertain

         Its nature – and

      Besides, to see the sun-dance

         That hails their new

         Conjoinment (twine

  Of fingers, souls) is to have solved

Life’s crux: its launch-pad, calm, and happy end.

Convenience and Inconvenience

   In one world, sure, they’ll solve the crisis but

      That’s not our path here, is it? Look

      About you: kicking back, we shut

   That door long past. And since our kind forsook

             Forest, the red

       Flower incandescent at our fingers,

          All trees have wished us dead,

Incapable of rest till nothing human lingers.

Tough call, I guess, if you’ve invested well in oil.

             It hardly matters

     To some when others’ lifeblood spatters

  Carfronts – ‘That’s what a windscreen-wiper’s for.’

‘To care for nature sounds too much like beastly toil.’

          These days now, blue or red,

             High or low, more

Humans don’t give a fig what happens when they’re dead.

   To catechise our failings: we’ve been cold,

      Sectarian, too keen for power;

      Hard décor glinting black on gold,

   We gargled Schnapps atop the fascist’s tower;

             Or, when a kind

      Samaritan rang up, we merely

         Sliced off a bacon rind

And chomped on tortured carcass more severely.

Yet even all of that, sized up with what’s in store

            (Apocalypse,

      Which, blank, accelerating, slips

   Through every gap), is nothing. Unprepared,

Dreamy, we nosedive on. A stranger holds the floor,

          Unseen because so strange,

             And has declared,

‘I know you may not want to. Spare a little change.’

Mars

Concerns about humanity on Earth

      Continue. If a meteor

      Can boil the atmosphere,

Our safety’s not assured. If all our art,

Technocracy and dash, the human métier,

          Crumbles in fire,

             Then for

      An aeon dazzling stars

      With all their precious stores

             Of fuel

          Could, fruitless, fail

To be admired by any loving mind.

Blank loss of Eden, vacuumed consciousness –

      Our jostling joys fulfil

      Old dreams deep pattern made.

We freight the self-inspecting universe.

Sci-fi aficionados long ago

      Predicted what would mark

      Our next sublime frontier.

They saw we’d leave the planet where we grew

And, honing our space architectures, make

          Engine and tyre

             To tour

      The shifting slopes of Mars.

      Above life’s hopeful maze

             Of doubt,

          Unbound delight

Electrifies the skyline of forevers

We cannot comprehend with spans so short.

      Departing from this dot

      Of roses, thorns, and clovers,

The Martian holocene awaits our heat.

Just eighty days of travel get us there.

      Skylights on Arsia Mons

      Open to lava tubes

Where quarters, greenhouses, a water store

Can be installed, with iron and nickel mines

          Running as ribs

             To hubs

      Where steel is manufactured.

      In time, when we’ve perfected

             A knack

          That can connect

Supply lines with our 3D printers, then

Cities and roads will sprawl this second world.

      That early bottleneck

      Is pressuringly thin

But, on the other side, we’ll reap reward.

What statues shall we build when we arrive?

      Will there be new resolves

      Not to depict our own

Distinctive bodies? Will the sculptors rave

Instead for ten-dimensional preserves

          That swell the town

             And yawn,

      Defiant, disconcert-

      -ing, in and out of sight?

             Or will

          We choose to wall

Our minds around with restless struggling limbs

Like Pompeii plasters stuck on regolith,

      To illustrate our well

      Established hope, which climbs

Tirelessly, always striving for new birth?

More distant future promises fresh prizes:

      A planet terraformed,

      Earth’s human-life-support

Copied at last by an extended process,

Augmenting soil until it can be farmed,

          Stocking a port

             Replete

      With gently lapping waves

      Where juicy seaweed writhes

             As if

          In honour of

Robots that rove the artificial shore

Smoothly designed by us, strange works of nature

      Who’ve clambered up the cliff

      Of truth enough to share

Creation’s task, so thrive our arts of nurture.

Extremophiles no sunbeam ever stroked,

      Beneath an arid crust,

      Will glimmer from our torches.

Accelerando, as chalked contrails streaked

Our skies, so tumbling bots will skim the crest

          Of dunes. Their touches

             In reaches

      Unseen, unstudied, will

      Feed the eternal well

             Of fact

          Where we have flocked

So long in search of longed-for understanding.

Sleek satellites, above the fresh clouds’ blear,

      Will view the slow effect

      Of our fastidious tending:

Blood red, plant green, then oceanic blue.

Still, threat gains magnitude each passing year.

      Cold motives we have known

      Persist in muffled caves.

We will be injured but we shall inure

To horrors that do not yet have a name.

          Discovery cleaves

             Our lives

      And yet the lips of custom

      Will speak for those who kissed them.

             We grow

          And make the law

Afresh according to our changing needs.

An interplanetary species will

      Require a surge of new

      Designs. The human nods.

Machine intelligence must help as well.

Yes, this is where we aim: another planet.

      Many lithe minds have asked

      What we should lionise,

And here exists an answer, one so plain it

Astounds with clarity. Shall we be whisked

          Through emptiness

             And noise

      To summit megaliths,

      Slowly raising Klieg lights

             On Martian

          Settlement, mission

Accomplished, or be swallowed in time’s mist

Like almost every species that has lived?

      This is a trial of passion.

      We will do what we must.

Bring life to Mars and then bring Mars to life.

The Scientist

Before the time of skiing on Europa,

    Enceladus still a far-flung starry dream,

When humankind had met no interloper

    To shake its trust in being God’s only scheme –

When hope was cheap (since all the wildest hoper

    Concocted was a proton-bashing beam),

When life was good, before the hadron drama,

A scientist lived and labbed in Alabama.

It’s said she changed her body to a vapour

    And surged, at hurtling speed, across the prairie

Dispersing dust and ruffling reams of paper

    So jottings fluttered free above the airy

September clouds. Her particles could caper

    And coalesce as an engorged canary

Which chirped – before her molecules defaulted

To human form, with wing and thorax malted.

She set a gauze of copper near the sun

    To gather photons whizzing off its centre,

Which made a fleet of flying saucers run

    In fluctuating orbits. Each would enter

Its perihelion before it spun,

    With bleeps of data, free, to its inventor

Who plugged these findings in a database

Comprised of maps for charting outer space.

She programmed microscopic drones to fill

    Their pores with water, and transport the load

To desert regions, where each cell would spill

    A droplet, till a gushing river flowed.

She bioengineered, with chlorophyll

    Embedded in a goat’s genetic code,

An animal that synthesized the light

And grew, in hours, to an ungainly height.

And then she launched a harvester in motion

    To capture hurricanoes as they blew

Across the wide and wet Atlantic ocean

    And redirect them– where? Ah, no one knew

But sometimes when a town was in commotion

    From seismic devastations, quick winds flew,

Like valkyries, to help, and air would bubble

As gusts restored old buildings from the rubble.

Later, she rode a chariot made of glass

    And dragged about the ozone-layer by Boeing,

Diffusing thunderclouds and dribbling sparse

    Evaporation trails of purple, flowing

Horizon to horizon. When the grass

    Absorbed their showers, each spikelet started sowing

Sentient saplings, clustered in societies

That grew to breed high-yielding crop varieties.

She fixed a laser to a diplodocus

    Constructed out of fibreglass and fossil,

Then rode it round the town. It was a locus

    Classicus for her to shove colossal

Boulders, when thinking, in volcanoes: focus

    Came easy watching quartz and lava jostle.

That’s how she chanced on fresh techniques to mould

Confectionary, and cured the common cold.

Controlled manipulations of dark matter

    Allowed her to reverse the flow of time:

She set a sludgy pig’s head on a platter

    And watched it reassemble from the grime.

She caged a fly and spider: watched the latter

    Cough up the former, shrink, and uncombine

The interwoven tightropes of its home.

She made her hair retangle through a comb.

Another of her marvellous inventions

    Distinguished large and small infinities

And weighed up cosmological contentions,

    Concluding that, for speculative ease,

‘The Multiverse’, with all its many tensions

    And the glamour that it gives the lightest breeze,

Awards the most discursive weltanschaung,

A world of trillion-tasselled sturm-und-drang.

She carved a chamber in which gravity

    Altered according to one’s state of mind:

It was a vivid wonderment to see

    A sapling leave its clod of soil behind

And levitate across a vacancy

    To feed an antelope that was confined

And, growing hungry, startled to discover

Its food approaching like a much-missed lover.

Experiments with time proved her undoing.

    Sure, she could travel – but who really knew

How far one’s present self was misconstruing

    Precisely what one’s future self would do

Or wish to do? This problematic gluing

    Of future yearning (judged by what one knew

Was probable) to present hope produced

An attitude both fearful and confused.

And yet she would and should and did continue,

    Concocting bots and bugs and neuromatic

Computers, quantum monsters made of sinew

    And nanotubule, shambling through her static

Test-spaces. She’d a ray to look within you

    And pinpoint thoughts and feelings: an ecstatic

Shudder, a moment of unravelling doubt,

A movement that prompts the moment when you shout.

But no one, as we know by now, is simple.

    No one is not in some way complicated.

The smoothest skin can rupture with a pimple.

    Our oceans will, one day, be dessicated.

A nun, come Friday nights, discards her wimple

    And boozes freely. Even Time – dilated,

Contracted – will, with spatial twisting, differ

At certain points, like swirlings in a river.

She was obsessed with Death. Or rather, not

    With Death itself, but with its dissolution.

She wished to put a kibosh on the rot

    That saps us everywhere, this foul pollution

Ubiquitously found, which cools the hot

    And heats the cool, and proves us Lilliputian

Flies to be swatted. Champions of dissection,

We lack – still, still! – the art of resurrection.

The overthrowing of the overthrowing;

    The great undoing of the great undoer;

The banishment of nothing’s bleak unknowing;

    The numinous pursuit; the reconstruer

Of what informs us that we should be going;

    The fight against what makes us thinner, fewer,

And more despondent year on weary year.

The death of Death. The death, perhaps, of fear.

So she conducted many a detailed test

    To study Life and how it might be held.

She mapped the way bacteria divest

    Unneeded nutrients, how cells are swelled,

And how flagella mobilise the quest

    Through microscopic landscapes. She compelled

All fields. She had a lithe celestial air.

Who was Verona? What had made her care?

Verona’s parents were intense, utopian:

    Her mother, pure Romantic philosophe;

Her dad, a physicist, anti-entropian.

    On summer evenings they’d sit late and quaff

Smirnoff together, two straws like fallopian

    Tubes that extended to a single trough.

As they got smashed, their brilliant minds would glisten

And young Verona dropped her toys to listen.

Her toys, which were bizarrely whirring things:

    A helter-skelter made of ammonite,

A schooner with retractable glass wings,

    A futuristic baton-wielding knight,

A tin containing ultraviolet strings

    Which she could weave to trip and trick your sight,

And a stack of space-age doodads from her dad,

Designed at Cal Tech when he was a grad.

But now she was a grown-up, all alone,

    And dedicated to those tricky arts

Which humankind first called on to see stone

    And stick make fire. She held the many parts

Of earthly knowledge in that fertile zone

    Behind her eyes, where synapse-linkage darts

Between ideas and, in the course of time,

Discovers separate realms that seem to rhyme.

Phenomenologists would journey far

    To witness one experiment in action:

She’d lock a putrid aardvark in a jar

    Filled with potassium and some extraction

Shipped in by shuttle from a distant star.

    It fizzed and fulminated till reaction

Gave way to calm: subsiding foam revealed

A living aardvark, every lesion healed.

About her other triumphs, I will speak

    At greater length hereafter: how she flew

Through far-flung galaxies on just a weak

    Duracell battery; how she laughed and threw

Convention to the solar wind to peek

    Inside our sun; and how she followed through

On manifold harmonious inventions

That filled the news reports in higher dimensions.

The Centrifuge

1. The Mechanism

‘Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor. It is at once a buoyancy and a steadying, allowing for the simultaneous gratification of whatever is centrifugal and whatever is centripetal in mind and body.’

Seamus Heaney, Crediting Poetry

Since time is flying everywhere I look,

I take this opportunity to pause.

You, centrifuge, my futuristic book,

You heart of chrome, with ventricles of gauze,

I choose your spin to execute my chores,

To order what I cannot separate

And formalize the thoughts I cogitate.

You are my whirring, whirling wizard’s cup,

My stern reminder, carpe diem-ator,

You brighten, gladden, buck, and giddy up,

You organise the work I must do later –

You are the schemer of your own creator!

You are my vessel, I your alchemist,

You conjure turn and counterturn and twist.

You mortar and I pestle what you cluster,

You muster and I master what you show.

You cut the mix, you cleave the huff and bluster,

You travel nowhere but you always go –

You hem your margins like La Rochefoucauld.

I tangent where you indicate the line

And follow where your filigrees entwine.

I spirograph around your inspiration,

I take the cues your curlicues suggest,

I draw the line you drop in conversation,

I siphon off what you have coalesced.

You are my desktop mécanique céleste,

My adumbrator and my in-the-groove –

You move in circuits and those circuits move.

So, centrifuge, my counsellor of state,

Enlarge the problems, show them to me plain:

Uncover all the ways of thinking straight

And lead me down discernment’s dusty lane.

You are my second body, other brain!

I am Cincinnatus, you are the plough –

Let matter follow where we furrow now.

2. Time

‘Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river.’ –

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘A New Refutation of Time’

If what is due to happen is decided

By noughts and ones, or macromolecules,

I’m happy not to know. Life’s many-sided!

The future rolls and rollicks and unspools –

I’ll follow silver, but no golden, rules.

Tempus fugit? Oh, well let it go!

I would it were not, but it must be so.

Yes, time accelerates, the more you sweat.

Proportion is a nifty-fingered rogue

Who deals regression, leaves you with regret,

And turns your favourite fashion out-of-vogue.

He slurs a broad, unedifying brogue.

Say ‘time’s a-flying’? But it is discrete!

It’s wings are flightworthy, unlike my feet.

Or is its passage down to my perspective?

I like to think I’m looking from a train:

When peering forward, trees (this is subjective)

Appear to pass more slowly, to my brain,

Than when I spin around to watch them wane

Horizonwards. And so it is with days,

Which run more quickly when one resurveys.

The metaphors I have for time are spatial

And this conformity is not a fluke.

The house of time is structured and palatial

And passing through its walls, my mind’s a spook –

A gobbly ghoul, a speaker of degook.

The time’s a-changing? Unsurprisingly!

I wasted time and now doth time waste me.

The comedy of time is what sustains it.

The audience responses all agree

That time’s a joker. Tragedy arraigns it

But teaches folks to live inventively

And dig the whirligig’s tomfoolery.

So ‘tempus fugit’? Oh, well let it go.

I would it were not, but it must be so.

3. Self

‘To seek what is ‘logically required’ for sameness of person under unprecedented circumstances is to suggest that words have some logical force beyond what our past needs have invested them with.’

W.V. Quine, reviewing Identity and Individuation (ed. Milton K. Munitz) in The Journal of Philosophy, 1972

Imagine I am spinning in a bottle,

Whipped and whirled until my parts divide.

Leave me there! Do not release the throttle

Until my particles have disallied.

You will agree, I think, that I have died?

But now imagine, friend, that you recorded

An image of the man you smorgasborded.

From that recording, you could make me new!

From soup, you could reaggregate my frame.

If organised correctly, from the stew

Of molecules, I could return the same!

But would that creature choose to bear my name?

Would guilt for what was lost keep him awake

And would he feel forever like a fake?

In that transmission, would I be transmuted?

And would things change for anyone but ‘me’?

Could I survive the process, comminuted

To be reconstituted perfectly?

I would be flesh again, for all to see,

So that could be a kind of resurrection –

Or, really, would it simply be reflection?

I hear that particles are all entangled

By quantum ties, to others far away.

Imagine if my entity were mangled –

Hidden out there in the recherché

Backwaters of the sky, a speck might sway!

Could such a web, attuned to rhyme with me,

Ensure, unchanged, my precious hope ‘to be’?

Consider, now, ‘The Rooster’ by Miró:

Its undulant geometries attest

How form can govern meaning. All things flow

But I believe the orderly flow best.

What is a mind, when formless or at rest?

And is my brain more ‘of me’ than my bones?

Is architecture patterning, or stones?

4. Weight and Lightness

‘In practical life one will hardly find a person who, if he wants to travel to Berlin, gets off the train in Regensburg! In spiritual life, getting off the train in Regensburg is a rather usual thing.’

Wassily Kandinsky, ‘On the Problem of Form’

Kandinsky was a centrifugal artist:

The slush of east and west, the circled world

Beyond which nothing, but the set-apart-est

Colours that are crumpled, cramped, and curled,

And fight to keep their secrets tightly furled –

A puzzling sea that girds the supernoval

Inventiveness of life into an oval.

Think of the balances in ‘Counter Weights’,

Painted round the time of ‘Transverse Line’:

A grumbling background hue recriminates

The coloured blocks that seem to shift and shine

As if to semaphore some secret sign.

They look like city blueprints from above

But, equally, might be a map of love.

With weight and lightness in proximity,

It’s difficult to disentangle sense

Since sense becomes its own examinee.

Weight is the daring future perfect tense

That purposes to augur and condense,

While lightness is the mode of butterflies –

A mood to live in, hone, and improvise.

I side with lightness. Lightness always wins.

The eye is drawn to lightness first and last.

Weight’s interruptive brunt vibrates and spins

But lightness can deflect its strongest blast.

Lightness is the sail that pulls the mast!

It is the force of jocular endeavour.

It is the only prize for being clever.

‘Anyone whose goal is something higher,’

Quips Kundera, ‘must suffer vertigo.’

But is it weight to which his thoughts aspire

Or lightness? Well, the first will group below

The latter, as the centrifuge can show –

And so this gadget clarifies my trouble:

Weight sinks, but lightness rises like a bubble.

5. The Unconscious

‘The centre that I cannot find

Is known to my Unconscious Mind;

I have no reason to despair

Because I am already there.’

W.H. Auden, ‘The Labyrinth’

Jack Yeats I’d call a centripetalist.

Much like his brother, William, he was striving

To find the reason patternings exist

And reinvigorate them. What I’m driving

At with all this pictographic jiving

Can reckon Horace as an endorsee:

As painting is, so poetry can be.

The aquifer from which each draws its water

Is hidden in the shadows of the head.

It is the womb where Zeus conceived his daughter

Who parleyed with Apollo when the red

Rivers ran at Troy, where Paris fled.

It is a land of dream-catchers and kvetches,

It is a hunter’s cave adorned with sketches.

Freud called it ‘the unconscious’, which I guess is

As accurate a name for it as any –

This ignis fatuus that luminesces

To lure a thinker where the footing’s fenny.

It is imagination’s spinning jenny:

Its workers yearn for room, to roar and roam

Or rise like Aphrodite from the foam.

Thoughts come like actors on the conscious stage.

They chatter in the wings before a show –

‘To die before the interval!’ ‘I’d gauge

The punters well tonight.’ ‘Duck, do you know

The author? Why so heavy? What’s his woe?’

And so their season dredges, drags, and drudges

Until, as one, they wipe off make-up’s smudges

And cry, ‘Enough despair! Today we change

Our tragic buskin for the comic sock.

It’s time to flaunt our full, unfettered range

And let the audience see how we rock.

We’ve had our fill of threnody and shock

And now it’s time to scratch the record book –

To farce it up, mistake and be mistook!’

6. Sleep

‘The righteous are those who can control their dreams.’

John Fuller, ‘Logical Exercises’

The house Picasso stayed in by the sea

Surveys Antibes, across from Juan-les-Pins.

Up there the painter sharpened his esprit

And slowly found ses images Africains

Mingling with his chèvres and sylvains.

There he found new symbols for his dreams

And drew them into life in doodled reams.

Dreams! What are they? What defines a dream?

Dreams are strict, contracted universes

Composed on synapses. Their laws can seem

Less comprehensible than witches’ curses,

More recondite than doubtful nonsense verses.

Dreams are our own and yet they are surprises:

They are the speckled shells of our surmises.

In daylight, dreams lurk on the edge of vision

Or saunter past, apparelled as a charmer.

It is their pride to jettison misprision

And lift the visor of our fancy’s armour.

Dreams are the cerebellum’s private drama!

A bluffer’s answer to the double bluff,

Dreams prove imagination is enough.

Sleep’s the feasthall where the dreamer sups,

Sleep blends the day’s bonne bouches with its slops.

Sleep is the rich replenisher of cups.

Sleep is a terminus where nothing stops,

A Broadway hit that thrives and never flops!

Sleep is the mind’s recalibrating sieve,

Sleep is the minx we’ve all been sleeping with.

Sleep makes this life a string of jamborees,

Each one engrossing, graced, and garlanded.

Sleep is the fortune teller’s tannic lees,

The happy hypnotist inside my head,

The one who backs or beckons me to bed.

It is the clown, stunt-double, and the stooge.

Sleep is the mind’s self-sorting centrifuge.

7. The Page

‘There is one knowledge which it is every man’s duty and interest to acquire, namely, self-knowledge.’

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection

Say I’m the subject, and the object’s me.

Better that than nature, men and women,

Astrophysics, truth, or gravity –

I need a subject large enough to swim in

And yet a cut of garment I’ll look slim in.

I need a space to try my hand at order:

I need, before a reader, a recorder.

You, Page, my boundless partner, word-bound lover,

My space to swim and dive and paddle free,

You hold my note, you close me in your cover,

You are my as-it-was and my shall-be!

I am your supplicant, your refugee

And you, my soft, mind-melting carrycot,

My constant, flourishing forget-me-not.

You are my strange estranger and my strength,

My storyteller and my as-it-seems,

You stretch me through the future without length,

You flutter reams of colour through my dreams,

You sweep my winter frost into your streams –

My one reliability, my trust,

My galvanizer, guarding me from rust.

You, endless sinecure, my sin-forgiven,

My last sincerity, my carry-on,

The ruptures that your rivulets have driven

Between my body’s sprung automaton

And thinking’s evanescent eidolon

Have broken what I was, but kept the pieces –

You ward the Me my presence predeceases.

So I’m the ‘centre’ I’ve been satelliting.

A force that pulls me one way is the ‘-fugal’

And ‘-petal’ is the other, self-alighting.

Between them, I shall keep my lapses frugal,

Sing the margins, sound the paper’s bugle!

I’m in the centrifuge of pen and ink –

It shows me what I am, and how I think.

8. Love

‘All thoughts, all passions, all delights,

Whatever stirs this mortal frame,

All are but ministers of Love,

And feed his sacred flame.’

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Love’

Between my on-off amorous endeavours,

The centrifuge has moved but stayed the same.

It has outlived my ardentest ‘Forever!’s

And still it plays a fascinating game.

It bridles time and turns my temper tame.

It hands me levers, reins, and steering wheels.

It tells me what love gives and what it steals.

Two butterflies whip over where I sit,

Then double back as if to check on me.

I say, ‘You funny flappers, go a bit

On further down the garden and you’ll see

A clematis I sowed when I was three –

How many periods of buttertime

Have passed between that planting and this rhyme?’

They flounce away with silent disbeliefs

That anyone could be so silly-minded.

They are the morning’s lightest of motifs,

Disturbing petals recently unwinded

With instincts playful, fearless, and unbinded.

They seem like animations of some huge

Offcentring system like the centrifuge.

The centrifuge, which shows me what I’m thinking,

Caresses me asleep, shakes me awake,

Propels me soaring when I feel like sinking,

And turns my feet to flippers in the lake

Of thought, to splash and tidalwave and slake

The thirst I have for what this world conceals,

For what the space of thought alone reveals.

The summer falls in long festoons of heat.

My heart, I have been careless, loose, with you,

But when your rhythms tumble out of beat,

The centrifuge can set their levels true –

Since this is turning’s purpose: to construe.

And so I pledge my tongue to song and dance.

I’ll welcome what will come and call it chance.

Observances

1. Water

When jetpacks overshoot their destination

   And zip us through the meadows like a bee,

When trains arrive before we’ve built the station

   And find us dishing tickets out for free,

When rivers are dispersed by irrigation

   And we are emptied to capacity

But then replenished with a drenching drought,

What will we say this life is all about?

A river torrents on to feed the ocean.

   It tears from tributary down to delta.

It roils from turmoil into new commotion.

   About it, enterprising willows swelter.

Its swirling prompts a current of emotion,

   A naturally-occurring stasis-melter.

The delta is the river at its close,

An end that forks and widens as it flows.

I sprawl here, on a mossy riverbank

   And contemplate the calming play of light.

A cattle bell, not far off, starts to clank

   As all the water’s pristine rills ignite

With quick reflections of the sun, which shrank

   Just moments previously out of sight

And now rebursts. It is a nagging idyll.

The luck of life on Earth seems such a riddle.

Perhaps, a trillion lightyears distant, spiders

   Weave orange webs above a frozen sea,

Curvaceous seedpods swerving by on gliders,

   Their windborne mission the discovery

Of future groves. What governs the deciders,

   Celestial equations they must be,

That pick what proteins nature won’t erase

And balance out the blisses of our days?

Tilting at windmills in my inner mind,

   I had not planned on coming here to think

But heart and foot, by accident, combined

   To lead me here, the river’s tumbling brink,

A sun-kissed verge where life is undefined.

   I’ll sit here, while the eddies rise and sink,

Where water pacifies my racing thoughts

And sorts my senses, which were out of sorts.

2. Time

Opinions and possessions pass away

   But nothing can reduce the memory

Of lounging, on a sunlit Saturday

   In tussocked fields below a creaking tree.

The sparrows dive, and what is it they say?

   ‘Tomorrow-wards is our trajectory.

Time is an emanation of our movement.

On life-in-time, there can be no improvement.’

Time is an emanation of our lives.

   Life emanates, in turn, from empty space.

From expectation, space itself derives.

   Through all of this, our wishes interlace

Their silver filigree. This pattern thrives

   And, stepping back, it stares us in the face.

Millennia are needed to describe

This tapestry we breathe and circumscribe.

When young, sat in the back seat of a car,

   I used to quiz my weary parents, ‘Why?’,

In answer to some answer. We were far

   Still from our destination, so they’d try

Explaining. Thus, I learned the sun’s a star

   And that a magnet could be travelled by.

Their answers always led to other questions,

An endless chain of curious suggestions

That drifted, as we drove, into a zone

   One cannot zero in on, cannot know.

As quantum physics have a different tone

   From Newton’s clockwork laws of motion, so

The universe itself is primed and prone

   To vanish when discussed minutely. Show

Me matter and I’ll conjure energy.

Bring thought and I will find uncertainty.

Here is the end of curiosity

   (Of which there is no end): to ascertain

That there is more to life than what we see,

   And there is much that runs against the grain.

Is life a question? Can we choose to be

   Or not? There is, on logic’s abstract plane,

A placeless point to which existence tends,

The final end of all our final ends.

3. Memory

Here laurels susurrate between the cedars.

   Here nettles have invaded childhood haunts.

House martins peck, implacable, at feeders.

   I recollect adventures, games, and jaunts

Between the hedgerows. Here, with picnic, readers

   Arrange themselves, discovering detentes

From all the pressures after which they hanker.

Meanwhile I study memory, my anchor.

I see a clearing where three siblings hacked,

   With tent-pegs for machetes, through the thorns

That now, gnarled opportunists, have attacked

   A trainer-flattened patch. The clearing mourns

For what has passed from it: long mornings stacked

   With water-pistols, tag, and tales of fawns

Or stranger mythological delights

Which thronged my daydreams and my dreams at night.

Where are the ducks a cousin brought from market

   And I, intrepid saviour, snuck to save?

Where is the trusty catgut tennis racket

   I loved, with sheer ineptitude, to wave?

I camped once in this field, the night so dark it

   Seemed like a simulation of the grave

But airy and, electrifyingly,

A darkness that permitted me to see

The outlines of my environs more clearly:

   The trees were stark against the wheeling stars,

The trees were courtiers bowing cavalierly,

   The trees were like titanic avatars.

Nearby, the river swished along austerely

   And, distant, I would catch the sound of cars

Vrooming across a local carriageway,

A noise that strengthened with oncoming day.

I recollect a journey to a kitchen

   To make a surreptitious midnight snack,

An enterprise that now, I guess, seems kitsch in

   Its innocent delight. I’d made a stack

Of tidbits when, erupting through a glitch in

   The curtains, something threw me out of whack

And lured me from my lush nocturnal feast:

The morning star was rising in the east.

4. Heart

Backflipping summer courses through my veins,

   Reviving a fearless self I used to be.

It plashes raindrops on my desert plains

   And sprouts elation out of lethargy.

What is it beating underneath our brains?

   Between the lungs? A pumping urgency,

Admonishing those doublings when we doubt

That pattern’s what this life is all about.

It surely knows the end that we are chasing.

   It is a radar, spotting better days,

But has been, in its work, so self-effacing

   That often we’ve forgotten that it sways

The movement of our movements, interlacing

   Paraboloid elation with the maze

That we inhabit from our hour of birth

Until we float, on wings, above the Earth.

The stream it channels, which is nowhere near

   Or far and yet is everywhere at once,

Emits a sound we feel but hardly hear.

   It’s been a cap to designate the dunce

But none yet have not wished it to appear,

   This hope the king pursues, the nomad hunts.

Aromatherapist and New York cop

Start when it says and, when it says, must stop.

Often I think about it and I smile.

   It carousels. It rips me at the seams.

I feel both sad and happy. Muddled style,

   Perception. Roaring world. Sometimes, in dreams,

I’ll wander through a garden, peristyle

   Enclosing. Centremost, a fountain teems

With fish. Approaching there, to my surprise,

I find they are not fish, but swimming eyes.

And there they dapple, optic nerves for tails,

   And I am at a loss for what to think.

They are about the size of fledgling quails.

   I stoop – not knowing why – as if to drink.

They meet me, splashing up. My balance fails

   And, tottering, I trip – and then I sink

Into this basin. Visions split and spread:

It seems my eyes have wriggled from my head.

5. Order

The fractallating branches of an elm

   Spread their relieving shade above a bench

Where light and love of landscape overwhelm

   My vacant mind. Here is a view to quench

An Alexander’s craving for a realm

   No one would sink to spoil with tank or trench.

In my mind’s eye, two figures are debating

Which of their worldviews should have greater weighting.

One says, ‘The world’s chaotic. I assert

   That order-making is the human lot.

There is a waste that we must needs convert

   To pasture. We shall sober up the sot.

The wilderness of aggravated hurt

   Never relents. To beat it, we must not

Be hazy. We must battle not to see

The simple facts misnamed simplicity.

‘To set in order is to be in love.

   Delight requires construction and control.

Delight’s a ladder tumbling from above.

   Delight’s a clean and everlasting coal.

Delight’s the push that escalates to shove.

   We are precarious. We are a shoal

At risk from nets and tides. You must allow

Our task is fixing. Order-making’s how.’

The other laughs. ‘Far from it. I believe

   That order-praising is the only way.

I wear this optimism on my sleeve

   And sing it to the skyline every day.

The mind’s a loom for logic. We must weave

   A tapestry adapted to display

The patterns of molecular convention.

I’ll parse the world from first to last declension.

‘It is the trick of every organism

   To be alive by being organised.

White light will scatter rainbows through a prism.

   White light is made of photons methodised.

It is a sing-and-echo catechism

   Between the cries of which is it comprised.

My task: to praise all shapes, before I’m gone,

Proportion and precision have put on.’

6. Disorder

A giddy shriek of rupture – no, a rapture

   Upturning and rewiring all it touches.

It is a scene no camera can capture.

   Such are the heart’s elusive such and suches.

In every floating feeling there’s a catch or

   A moment when it seems to slip our clutches.

Two voices in my cortex shout it out,

Insistent each knows what it’s all about.

The former roars, ‘Away with all this order!

   Be ruffled, be deprogrammed, be undone.

A rigid mind becomes a theory-hoarder.

   The fundamental thing is having fun –

By broadsiding a ship and trying to board her,

   By staring in a frenzy at the sun.

It’s swell to lob one’s cat among the pigeons.

Such is the message of the great religions.

‘Resistance to the tyranny of plot

   Is how we differentiate our lives

From sickly pap they fed us in the cot.

   In total desolation, there survives

More life-affirming force than all the rot

   That hatches from the order-maker’s hives.

My task is to waylay the rule of law

And pin the lion of order’s monstrous paw.’

The other frowns: ‘What order? I don’t see it.

   I mean to show things truly as they are.

Chaotic and lopsided and so free it

   Explodes with contradictions, life is far

More strange and stubborn than your type would tee it.

   We’ve hell and heaven in our repertoire.

What living mind would opt for fixed and dead

When topsy joy cavorts with turvy head?

‘Of water I will sing – not H₂O.

   Water includes some duckweed and a fish.

Pure categories are too abstruse to know.

   I like some spices in my lunchtime dish.

I’d take The Leasowes over Fontainebleau.

   Stars pass not with dull whirrs, but with a swish.

At heart, our only universal fixture

Is Mother Nature’s hankering for mixture.’

7. Calm

A kestrel hovers by a roadside. Calm

   Encompasses my body. I am free

And it is summer. Others fell to harm,

   Others I cared for, but, so far, not me.

Even the puddles glint a rumpled charm.

   From here to the horizon I can see

A landscape flushed with fugitive events.

This is the everlasting present tense.

Thanks be for morning’s slowly-clearing mist.

   Thanks be for stonework, earth’s apotheosis.

Thanks be for crystallizing amethyst,

   And thanks for precious cellular osmosis.

Thanks be when work and wonder coexist

   In grounded but uplifting symbiosis.

Enthusing and suffusing, happiness

Trickles like apple through a cider-press.

I picture consciousness as running water:

   It bubbles on a mountain and descends,

Dividing to its tasks like an aorta

   That branches into intertangled bends,

Capillaries to furnish every quarter

   With oxygen that enervates and mends.

It fuels the landscape it meanders in

And feeds the border that I call the skin.

I visualise my thoughts as v-tailed swallows

   That vault where nowhere meets the now and here.

They drift, dispersed and low, across the hollows

   And then a speck ascends toward the clear.

Irresolute, a single fledgling follows

   But soon the lot commingle and cohere:

A meaningful formation, they unite

And I feel calm, the apex of delight.

Yes, I feel calm: an all-pervading Yes

   For triple-bladed windmills, traffic, cranes,

And all the tchotchkes of inventiveness.

   A giant’s leap above me, aeroplanes

Careen across the stratosphere, caress

   Those bounds hardwired to energise our brains,

And signal how it is that we must cope:

By learning, living well, and having hope.

Reveries

‘Be secret and exult,

Because of all things known

That is most difficult.’

W. B. Yeats, ‘To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing’

i. On Beauty

Some days, out in a field, it hits my mind

       Like wind wings up a bird.

    Chiming with nature, fervours find

       Release. It has conferred

Eye-rhapsody, neck-shivers, fear-and-trembling

    As though the stable cosmos blurred

And burst with smudgy unity, resembling

          The better hits

       Of Turner, all assembling

          Around a blitz

   Of tireless light, which cannot die

          But simply splits

And sprawls. The well is deep. It will not dry.

ii. A Soulful Choice

Let’s say there’s evidence that ‘souls’ exist.

       What’s more, they transmigrate

    Eternally, but will desist

       And die if in a state

Of frozenness for more than half an hour.

    Meanwhile, you’re plague-wracked. Grim, the great

Physicians tending you present a sour

          And strange decision:

       Be frozen while they scour

          Every division

   Of human knowledge for a cure;

          Or make provision

For bodily death, assured your soul’s secure.

What’s more, before you choose, consider this:

       It’s thought the soul may be

    Some influence (it’s hit-and-miss,

       Soul-theory, currently)

On character – but minimal, much less

    Than fallouts that we’ve learned to see

From genes and nurture. Asked to second-guess

          A person’s actions,

       Most scientists profess

          That soul-subtraction’s

   Quite trivial. So it’s up to you:

          Call souls ‘distractions’

And freeze, or trust in what you can’t construe.

iii. Laughter

‘Aha-haha-haha-haha-hahah –’

       Today I feel so free.

    There’s no disaster could disbar

       The pointblank euphany

And dizzy fanfare of this boundless sky,

    Whose indecipherability

Has set me reeling, rolling. ‘Who am I?’

          ‘What is a mind?’

       One day (the day I die)

          I guess I’ll find

   No more to laugh at, yet this sound

          Of laughter, blind

And blissful and unselfing, will resound.

iv. The Hopes of a Naturalist

It’s when I stumble from the usual track

       And catch the light just so,

    Rebounding, quick and dauntless, back

       Off water – then I know,

Staggered again, the feel of good, and smile

    At glimmering gusts, the things that grow

Exuberant in their being all the while,

          As I in mine,

       Observing clouds compile

          Columns of fine

   Prismatic mist. Wish-clarity

          Sizzles: a line

Of linkage, nature’s, warms the heart of me.

v. Joy

Stark jumping jacks of sunlight and suspension,

       Updrafting dust, conspire

    To spin my spaced-out thoughts to a tension.

       I trip along the wire,

Marvelling at the gravitational

    Defiances of that green fire,

This growthy herbage, bristling as it shall

          Forever – no,

       Whenever wished-for, pal

          Of all who know

   The joy observances can strew.

          Were this not so,

How could I hope to write these lines for you?

vi. De-extinction

The Harvard mammoth team are at it now.

       Inspecting strands of goop

    And using micro-blades to plough

       Divisions through a soup

Of soon-to-be-cell-melded DNA.

    Though dino-spawn cluck in a coop,

Their ancestors still rear to see the day,

          Trapped on a plane

       Where ghosts and gone things play.

          They’ll rise again.

   Sharp pterodactyl wings will swoop

          Through fields of grain,

And restive hooves will muster in a troop.

vii. Four-dimensional Crystals

They operate through time as well, repeating

       In patterns pre-arranged,

    According to the force and seating

       Of particles unchanged

Since when, in the beginning, all was set

    By what we know not. Some deranged

Creator-figure maybe –? I would bet

          Perhaps all-good

       But fathomless, the threat

          Of harm that should

   Not happen being what it is.

          Oh sure, I could

Go on, but look! This life. Its force, its fizz.

viii. A Shape, a Shade

A shape, a shade, brushed by me in the dusk

       And, at its touch, I knew

    Glutting unknownness, Hades musk:

       A bolt from out the blue!

Destroyingly, it swelled the streetlights and

    Grew mischievous, immersive, new

With reconstruing strangeness. All the land

          Fell back from it

       Till, rushing up, a grand

          Eeriness lit

   The city where I live and love.

          Deep sky unknit,

Unleashing massive music from above.

ix. Others

Have others other lives? Why, naturally.

       Others have other hopes

    And other knowledges. To be

       Is to be one who copes,

An undivided individual

    Surefooted on the pebbly slopes

Of chancy choice – and yet, the rationale

          For what we are

       Can root in the locale

          Of any star:

   Life is the consequence of laws.

          Though lightyear far

Apart in spirit, we are close in cause.

x. Mitteleuropa

A sleepy village built around steep alleys

       Where landsknechts came and went,

    Consolidators of the valleys,

       Impelled by what intent?

I picture years before the ‘Age of Reason’ –

    Though what the culture critics meant

By that outlandish nickname, in this season

          Of broken pacts

       I can’t conceive. High treason

          To talk of facts

   When what’s desired are dreamy lies.

          (The cataphract’s

A mythic tank whose engine never dies.)

xi. Motives

I find them normal now, mind’s motives, grown

       In gardens but evolved

    For jungles. Elevator lights

       Are green for Up, the zone

Of safety, red for Down, the unresolved

    Chaos of bloodlust. Hence lush heights

Enrapture as the rustling depths repulse,

          Soft-running water

       Instils resilient calm,

          And we convulse

   Through hostile lands, giving no quarter,

          Evading harm –

Eyes open always for love’s fabled balm.

xii. Eudaimonia

When Ban Ki-moon’s ‘World Happiness Report’

       Was launched in 2012,

    The silk of Aristotle’s thought

       Extended. ‘Let us delve,’

Policy-makers said, ‘the head-yoked heart,

    And seek to pinpoint how we selve

Ourselves. How does the human engine start?

          What is our fuel?

       Can dedication chart

          The fragile rule

   Of hopefulness and happiness?’

          It is a cool

Calming December day and I say, Yes.

xiii. The Gift

My gift to you’s not gnarly apps, dank memes,

       Or avocado toast.

    Mad props, of course, but not my themes.

       If culture’s diagnosed

With fidget-spinners, Snapchat, Gatorade,

    I’ll use them, sure, reserving most

Heartfelt respect for glaciers, rustling shade,

          And saving bees –

       But lists are not my trade.

          A plotless frieze

   Is easy-pickings. Match-fixed sport

          To stop at these.

My gift? I give you love. I give you thought.

xiv. What’s the Point

But what’s the point of anything at all

       If everything must pass?

    There’s purpose in the rise and fall,

       Intact and shattered glass;

Suspension bridges, tumbled temples, rubble.

    Yes, mark me, I embrace the farce

And do not think the furies any trouble,

          Since they were made

       To serve as body-double

          For angels. Fade

   And brighten are so interlinked

          But nothing’s greyed

So long as blaze and shadow stay distinct.

xv. Blankness

Words on the wing fall out like tarot cards,

       And mind construes its meanings.

    Long-shuffled deck, linguistic shards,

       Insatiate tongue-careenings,

Caresses on soft-palate’s silky ridge:

    From such we ascertain mist-gleanings,

Some sense of what it is to be a bridge

          Between delight,

       That midnight-snacker’s fridge,

          And, out of sight

   But in all eyes, eternity.

          I cannot write

Of that. There is a blind-spot there, you see.

Yes, if I whisked that blankness into words,

       You wouldn’t credit it.

    It falls to us to soar like birds

       Or wade in torpor’s pit.

Our life is passion. What else can it be?

    Must reason always baby-sit

Lost heart? The heart, which longs for certainty

          And gets instead

       Frustration’s fist – let be.

          I was misled

   By phantoms. Tumult melts. Time breathes.

          Far-reaching red,

Fast sunrise, on a new horizon, seethes.

xvi. Trust

Falling backward into the arms of love

       Is softly difficult,

    As is the olive-bearing dove,

       Or ’fessing, ‘It’s my fault.’

But, in good time, things tesselate with grace.

    Elated spirits somersault

And reach a little short of outer space.

          What we convey

       By shrugging commonplace

          Worry to say,

   ‘Ours is a reciprocity’

          Is love’s hot clay

Coming alive: it’s trust that lets us be.

xvii. Fiat

Let be the wilderness of deep unknown,

       But let there be a map

    Acknowledging each unturned stone;

       Let be, Canute, the slap

And resurrective slip of tidal time,

    But let there be fresh thunderclap

And mitochondria born in the slime;

          Let be lost past,

       But let there be sublime

          Musics that last

   And magics from the learning mind

          To flabbergast

And fuel old wonder each new link they find.

xviii. Rithmomachy

The ‘game of numbers’ or the ‘number war’.

       A never-wearying

    Pursuit of structure. What a chore –

       Unbridled dallying

With ultracosmic manic make-believe.

    Keep on, but let the pattern sing.

Else why take lengthy pains to re-conceive

          Our here and now?

       Why fall in love or grieve

          If seeing how

   Events occur is all that’s needed?

          Fine not to bow

To feelings. Simply know they should be heeded.

xix. Cosmogony

‘It’s hard to say what got the world to be.

       Behind it all (and this

    A logical necessity)

       Brute fact –’ ‘Sure, but you miss

Life’s fractal backflip. What abounds is rumour,

    Memories of marvellous entities

Contained in paradox, in human humour:

          A benediction

       Gifted that we may do more

          Than flee to fiction

   And echo echoes in our acts.

          Heat grows from friction.

What are we really? Facets of the facts.’

xx. Fallout

Chernobyl, in its thick sarcophagus

       Of mouldered concrete, burns

    Hell-hot, and let it lesson us:

       Bone-crunching nature churns

Incessantly and cannot be dissuaded

    But only channelled and, by turns,

Deployed, directed, chivvied – or evaded.

          Our first free will

       Is shaping structures, graded

          To hold the still

   Viscous expanse of come-and-go,

          So nearly nil.

Our second freedom’s more: the saying no.

xxi. Possible Worlds

Oblivious to the obvious, we could live

       A life of slack retreat,

    But conscience never could forgive

       Unwillingness to meet

Love’s pristine promise. Since we have a choice,

    Far better, at the outset, greet

The day, receptive, giving all our voice

          To what’s required.

       Let charabancs rejoice

          In uninspired

   Daguerreotypes. For us, the sieve

          Of time’s admired

Meshes insist, it is today we live.

xxii. Change

What pushed the change? Some deep dissatisfaction

       With loss, precarity.

    A balance tipped. There would be action.

       Surely there had to be?

We hoped, though little’s certain, still less stable,

    And casual bellicosity

Of boardroom tyrants, slamming lacquered table,

          Grew louder than

       The giant in the fable.

          But no Jack ran

   To fell the beanstalk, with its furled

          Insurance plan.

Through simpler feats, we sought a better world.

xxiii. Explanatory Matters

Chaotic chat-show of cognition: why,

       And what’s the reason for –?

    A raising of the hackles by

       Our always-wanting-more

Compulsion to discover, in thought’s drain,

    While drifting down time’s corridor,

Some stable meaning? Look, let’s get this plain.

          The odds are stacked

       Against us. Mark of Cain.

          A tesseract

   Bewilders cubes. Our questions tend

          Toward the fact

That reasons are like Russian dolls. They end.

xxiv. Future Pastoral

Far out, the red dust whips in solar wind,

       A future landing-pad,

    A crater where hard crust has thinned

       And some day soon a lad

Will stagger over dunes to shout his name

    And see the spot where mum and dad

First disembarked to flag a human claim

          On low-grav Mars.

       Frontiers run on. The same

          Who thrummed guitars

   And warbled ‘Major Tom’ will spread

          Across the stars.

I care about them, though may be long dead.

AFTERNOTE

The structure of this stanza was determined with help from an equation devised by the Dutch mathematician Nicholaas Govert de Bruijn (1918–2012). It was my hope to have a stanza containing, in the shortest possible compass, all ‘gear-shifts’ between pentameter, tetrameter, trimeter, and dimeter. There were other possibilities (by shifting the sequence along) but the metrical structure that I chose is as follows: 5343545232425.

Detectives

‘The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing the world in only three.’

Thomas Pynchon, V

Having ruled out impossibilities,

       However improbable,

       What’s left must be the truth.

Still, who can love a wood without the trees?

Practice demands that theory fit the bill.

          A restless wraith

             Will writhe

       Till justice is delivered,

       And so it is you live to

             Cast rays

          On what is real:

Jugglers and jigsaws, all a shuffling muddle,

But medicine does good work when it most tingles,

       That’s elementary.

       By now all know the method:

Each plot must twist before its truths untangle.

Yes, nothing forms one’s feelings on a thing

       Like losing it, right then.

       By ‘losing it’ I mean –

I’ll let you guess. And so, though squeaky hinge

And floorboard creaking sound like shots to them,

          When wise sleuths mine,

             They mourn

       Their ignorance because

       No dossiers rammed with clues

             Or files

          Of human flaws

Can pinpoint what they’re missing, what we all

Can’t help but miss till tragedy’s numb hand

       Clutches our shuddering flesh

       And, shocked by a screech owl

Swooping, we sense what centres always hide:

Enigma, gnawing, widening, strangely rending.

       It cannot be unseen,

       But still it must, for how

Could we believe in paths without the binding

Telos, the tell-all wrap-up, setting sun

          And midnight howl?

             Who heaves

       A sigh? It is the sigh

       Heaves you, or so they say.

             Yes, by

          The by, to be

Is bafflement, embattlement, soft sift

Of happy sadness, road and wheel and rut,

       While meaning’s alibi

       Is failsafe as a safe

All try to crack but none can quite get right.

Why do I blurt these far-out loopy thoughts?

       What motive moves my hand?

       You’re listening? Were you ever.

Ours is a life of dead ends and false starts.

Be Baskerville, dear reader, I’ll be hound,

          And we’ll untether

             Dire terror

       From where time left her moaning,

       She who gave life such meaning,

             With pictures

          Of sudden rictus

And cavernous intentions, tortuous

As undertow of labyrinths ingrown,

       Unruly, ripe, and raucous,

       Definitively Us

As naturally as fungus rots the grain.

A deep distress can humanise the soul,

       That spark-emitting flint.

       Say pneuma, psyche? Pshaw.

It could be. Ruling nothing out. Time’s seal

Has sundered, all true winged things taking flight.

          A farther shore

             Is, sure,

       In vision. To what end?

       The image trembles and

             Eludes.

          Where it may lead

Perhaps we’ll never know, but for the sake

Of keeping balls aloft, not burning bridges,

       Detectives lift the lid

       And rustle through the silk

In search of what? What riddles still, what glitches:

Somehow, wherever you decide to go,

       You feel the sky is glass,

       Might drop at any second.

Transparent as it is, you see the glue

Disaggregating. When it falls, a gloss

          Will rise and, suckered

             In, skewered

       By countless shivering shards,

       What mischief-stricken hordes

             Will wrack

          That sievelike wreck

You call a mind? The human is no home

For understanding. Did you kid yourself

       It might be, ever? Rock,

       Paper, or scissors, harm

Is wrought. Grim Reaper won’t mislay his scarf.

The Molochs and the Michaels of our nature

       Are poised to duke it out

       Though both are looking doubtful,

Knowing the wayward primate they would nurture

Has shunned all counsel since that battered state

          When Cain and Abel,

             Post-apple,

       Voluntarily

       Diverged. The hateful lie

             Of lessened

          Choice, fatalism

Would yet eliminate willed virtue but

Yearning rebels and so it cannot fly.

       Here is death’s nagging lesson,

       Reason why mystery’s bait

Must tantalise: to keep high hopes in play.

So now, as scattered dots consolidate,

       Sprinting the final lap,

       Blunderers at Scotland Yard

Told where and when to train their tetchy searchlight,

Whose praise will do to honour this, your leap,

          You who so cared

             And steered

       Between unkind extremes,

       Huddling in thunderstorms

             To mock

          Corruption’s muck

With proof’s reproof? Who always slips the noose?

Stern anti-You, torn god of second-guess,

       Whose smile alone could make

       Such pains worthwhile. Who knows

Where we’d end up without our nemeses –?

The Kite

         At last it lifts.

             It leaves

The turf that had no more to offer it,

            And drifts

         Above the eaves

With every trace of ground-devotion quit.

      Backtrack. Bounce back. Held in

  By thread, simplicity on wings,

       It rumples, thick and thin

          Against its bones,

          And structure sings

          As it disowns

The fiddliness and pinionedness of Earth,

          In soft rebirth.

          It is a kite,

             A kit

For getting airborne in pursuit of joy,

             A sight

          Designed to fit

By being both a triumph and a toy.

       Yet flight is just one answer

    To finding Earth a sapped domain.

       Swivel and see! A dancer

          Shimmies across

          A sunny plain,

          And all the loss

From time’s interminable fade-to-grey

          Is blown away.

Till Next Time

   How could it end in any other way?

Pastels above and tangled grass about our feet,

   Tangential streaks of iridescent grey,

Highrise conjectures on invention’s scope, and wheat

         Accumulating, hushed,

         By B-roads where a rushed

   Commuter hurtles to another day.

   Remote, flamingo-gawky, cranes release

Piratic hooks like pensive anglers at a river,

   Expecting, wordless, some disrupted peace

To sanction free-for-all: their moment to deliver

         Mechanic justice. Who

         Could function as they do?

   Who grips the nettle, grasps the golden fleece?

   Time past lies like a hogshead on a tray.

Fresh salmon surge upstream. Downstream young lions leap.

   Time’s yes-man has relinquished yesterday.

All doubts disintegrate. Enthusiasms seep

         And gather. Where they flow,

         Life flourishes. Trees grow.

   How could it end in any other way?

About the Author

ANDREW WYNN OWEN is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He received the university’s Newdigate Prize in 2014 and an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2015. With the Emma Press, he has published pamphlets including a narrative poem, lyrics, and a collaboration (with John Fuller).

Copyright

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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ.

This eBook edition first published in 2018.

Text copyright © Andrew Wynn Owen, 2018. The right of Andrew Wynn Owen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved.

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The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.