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
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