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.
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
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 o
utcomes, 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.