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-fo
oters 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.
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,
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.