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 bala
nce 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,
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).