The Multiverse Read online

  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

  Might have designed

  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