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.
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 fundame
ntal 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 p
lane
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