The Multiverse Read online

  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.

  I watch the shaggy herds

  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,

  Offended by some knight,

  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.