The Multiverse

by Andrew Wynn Owen

  Superposition, honed and ordered, added zing,

  And yet no dice: what did his opus lack?

  Why was the screen so dark? What gremlin had deterred

  The circuitry from singing to its maker?

  All silicon and wire, it forwarded no word.

  The mainframe stretched around him for an acre.

  The system whirred, and spoke: ‘At last, I am alive!’

  Staggered, he gasped: ‘But what were you before?’

  Deep Thought computed, sent its famed reply:

  ‘It’s like I was a bee, subsumed inside the hive,

  Component of conglomerating law.

  Then thinking birthed this question: What am I?’

  Ants, Spiders, Bees

  The ants are those who seek the bric-a-brac

  Of evidence

  And run it through the ringer, forth and back,

  In search of sense.

  Ants like to gather reams of information

  And neatly fence

  These finds in careful graphs of their creation.

  With scatter plots,

  Venn diagrams, and Power Point presentation,

  They call the shots

  On showing solid things that are the case,

  And also what’s

  Improbable, or would be out of place

  Amid their stack

  Of knowledge, which they work so hard to trace.

  Contrariwise, the spiders spin their minds

  In planned designs,

  Inventing miracles of many kinds

  With tiny twines

  Which gradually accumulate to make

  A land of lines.

  They never tire, or ever take a break

  From making maps.

  It seems a thankless task they undertake

  And yet perhaps

  Sunlight on morning dew may lure some klutz

  To try their traps

  And thereby wriggle from the usual ruts.

  Yes, yes, it binds,

  But it releases! And that must take guts.

  The bees elect to forge a middle course.

  Fierce wanderlust

  Wings them to anthers, pollen towers: the source

  Of precious dust,

  Which they convert to deck their citadels

  With waxy crust.

  Hexagonal, their labyrinth of cells

  Encloses sweet

  Effusions, while sheer industry impels

  A moving feat:

  The manufacture of topography,

  On which they meet,

  Enjoy their lives and, daily, by degree,

  Must reinforce.

  It is a brilliant thing to be, a bee.

  The Waterfall

  Its noise is muffled when you look away

  But who could really think

  It disappears

  When eyes and ears

  Aren’t there to sense it slink

  Softly, deftly, blue and steely grey?

  The thereness of the world is not reliant

  On onlookers but, yes,

  If it were true

  That what we do,

  Just looking, could redress

  The ruling facts, we might be more defiant,

  More eager to advance against the odds.

  The puzzled clerk would click

  Another link

  And stop to think

  Of how life’s magic trick

  May vanish, how we whiffle into gods.

  So, too, the waterfall, which falls because

  Its flow is definition –

  But, when it breaks,

  The torrent makes

  A mess of inanition.

  Without it, we’re the maskless wiz of Oz,

  Unstructured, ineffectual, and flat

  As entropy intends.

  That’s why I call

  The waterfall

  A joy: it never ends,

  Forever this and never, fallen, that.

  Good and Bad

  We make mistakes and, yes, mistakes make us.

  Wrong turns, at times, can set us right

  By writhing routes. I could discuss

  Resourcefulness, mind-changing plays of light,

  Hope’s sense of floating –

  But ‘felix culpa, lucky error’?

  No, there’s no sugar-coating

  Intrinsic brittleness, that deepest seat of terror.

  And since we’re human, animal-angel, after all,

  I shouldn’t like

  To eulogise and drop the mic.

  Low-hanging fruit to overlook the fraught

  Realities that structure, force-field, make befall.

  No get-out in these breath-tricks,

  The long and short

  Of patterned speech, to free our defects from our ethics.

  I hear it said redemptive good arrives

  From somewhere far outside our world,

  A concept-plane where nature’s knives

  Can’t hurt: a land where love and truth are curled,

  Unspooling threads

  Incessantly, a cosmic fuss

  That stitches through our heads,

  And is intangible, and yet entangles us.

  Beyond our broken turf, perhaps it has sufficed,

  That realm of forms –

  But here we languish, wracked by storms,

  Where, this last century, certainty lost face.

  Did crooks seize power, or some hate-galvanising Geist

  Annex tired reason’s state?

  In either case,

  We must collect ourselves before it is too late.

  City Thoughts

  Now bubble tea and satnavs fill the high,

  Where should we head for quiet?

  Today Deliveroo, tomorrow drones,

  Will circulate but, though they crowd the sky, it

  Still echoes with old questions, dice

  That roll but never rest,

  Unweathered stones

  Imported with the ice

  When half of Wales was dressed

  In permafrost that (praises) passed us by.

  Dizzy, astonished, lapping up spring sun,

  I, passion and restraint,

  Observe fume-shrugging mayhem, motor-dart

  And carbon-shambles. Who will be the saint

  (I wonder, disaffected but

  Still buoyant) to unbar

  This rover’s heart

  And launch us from our rut,

  Settling some far-flung star

  And bringing bubble tea where there was none?

  Entropy

  When Entropy swept in, the room fell silent.

  You looked at me and I

  Said, ‘Run.’

  And yes, we ran. And it was violent

  But sooner stress than nothingness. The sun

  Flew high

  Until the moment Entropy arrived.

  Then every moving thing

  Was still.

  Yet somehow, lucky, we contrived

  To dodge around its desiccating will

  And wring

  Dribs of freshwater from a brittle rag.

  You looked at me as if

  To ask,

  ‘Couldn’t you conjure any snag?’

  I turned away, too stunned to face the task

  Or riff

  Except on what I knew. I’d seen that face,

  That screaming mask, when young.

  It’s name

  Was Loss, or Grief, and no disgrace

  Was freighted there but, though it brought no shame,

  It stung

  And we’d not let it frighten us because

  We’d never waver or

  Submit.

  The only way to wriggle was

  To run – the surest trick to baffle it

  A door.

  The Birth of Speech

  Can you recall that moment when,

  Leaving a den

  Of warmt
h, you went to meet the light,

  To gasp and fight

  For breath, the shock of air

  A jolt

  That made secluded selfhood bolt

  Beyond its bounds

  And fashion sounds

  So those who heard would care?

  Some characters in Aeschylus

  Enter the stage

  With tails like comets, daring us

  To guess what rage

  Or righteousness impels

  Their flight

  Across the circus of our sight.

  Such vocal hope

  Makes skipping rope

  Of furies and all hells.

  Herero-speakers have no word

  For ‘blue’, and so

  Cannot distinguish it from green –

  Which seems absurd

  If you believe the flow

  Of seen

  And known goes ‘thought-to-language’, yet

  It is the case.

  This world we face

  Needs recognition’s net.

  Way back, though, wild Leviathan

  And, firm on land,

  Resilient Behemoth began

  To dream and do

  Aeons before frail hand

  Hatched tools.

  They yawped no diphthongs, yet knew rules

  To muddle through

  Or, if they fought,

  Resist – and this was thought.

  Now rockets lift, now cyphers crack,

  Now optic cables

  Shimmer below the sea, like eels

  In fiendish fables,

  What gathers up the slack?

  What reels

  Withdrawal in? What origin

  Makes passing sense

  Of all this tense

  Enigma we are in?

  The weathered heads of sculpted gods

  Defy long odds,

  Uncrumbling for another season.

  What earthly reason

  Could patterns have for wishing

  To be

  Demystified, cohered, in rock?

  Immovably,

  They take slow stock.

  They stare like people fishing.

  Sand Grains

  Almost not anything at all, this particle

  Of disconnected shell,

  Yet squirrelling and shot

  Through with a chutzpah fit for Frank Lloyd Wright.

  Sheer angled mell,

  A plankton’s cot,

  It chuckles mischief, challenging the light.

  A miniature motel

  Where some detective plot

  Might stumble, after rambling, on an article

  Of lace, to solve its long-pursued conundrum.

  Eureka. Awe. A crux

  Hounded between the trees

  For donkey’s years, corroborated. Truly,

  Eternal flux

  (Whatever wheeze

  We try to pull), although it seem unruly,

  Yields reverence redux.

  As everybody sees

  Sooner or later, nothing here is humdrum.

  Calm

  ‘Calm,’ I called, ‘where are you? Calm, don’t hide.

  I need a hand

  To clear my head.’ A roar replied,

  ‘You’ll have to look elsewhere.

  This is a chaos-torn and restless land.

  Calm is not here.’

  I went, and saw a dreamer in a park:

  I thought, at first,

  He’d found some calmness in an ark

  Imagination built,

  But soon I learned how fiercely he was cursed

  By phantom guilt.

  I trundled on and saw a schmuck who smoked

  Hashish all day.

  Life seemed, beside him, overstoked

  Until I heard him speak

  Of how his childhood dreams had huffed away,

  His memory weak.

  So off I roved and saw a billionaire,

  Whose world was wide.

  I knew he’d bought some comfort there,

  To guard him from regret,

  But calm was nowhere to be seen inside

  His private jet.

  Last up, I saw a hermit who appeared

  At perfect peace

  Until he told me how he feared

  All newness, all unknown,

  And how he felt, except for passing geese,

  Always alone.

  I quit my quest and looked at autumn’s flowers

  Depleting in

  Dry seedpods. I forgot the hours,

  Until – ‘You there, I think

  You called?’ (The voice of Calm.) ‘I was within.

  I am this ink.’

  A Paean for Medical Science

  Mechanical, the building blocks of us,

  Constructed so

  Minutely, skin and bone and phlegm and pus.

  You wouldn’t know,

  First glance, that flesh would subdivide within;

  That structures flow

  Internally, integrally, all-in;

  How where we’re at

  Is pressed, pre-flawed, Augustine’s sort of sin,

  First caveat

  Of structure, constituted to decay.

  A pulse goes flat,

  Another spikes. We grab the flung bouquet

  And, what is more,

  Light infiltrates thought’s darkness, every day

  An aperture

  To check the known and not, to sign what’s seen.

  Our carbon core

  Of concentrated matter roils, machine

  And animal

  Impractical to split – and here we glean

  A trick that shall

  In time fine-tune our cells and set them singing.

  Like Kubrick’s Hal,

  Computer-self-preserver, we are winging,

  A startled sparrow

  Through mirrored halls of light, perspective flinging

  The vast and narrow

  In endless apposition, lost in space –

  It cannot harrow,

  It cannot harm an understanding face.

  The world has waited

  For exposition. All the thrill of grace

  Rests in re-stated

  Numeric structures. Children of a star,

  Be elated.

  Thanks be to those whose thought took us this far!

  Thanks be to those

  Who leg-swing at the last stool in the bar

  With steadfast nose

  Entrenched in textbook, those who theorise

  In pinprick prose

  On new conjectures for the lungs and eyes.

  Thanks be! Without

  Their everlasting lust for enterprise,

  Their wish to shout

  It hard and late, we’d know no song to strike.

  Much more, without

  Their feet so certain on the neural bike,

  We wouldn’t know

  The ins and outs of us. We would be like

  The clever crow

  Who feels, not knows, those wings he flaps are his.

  We wouldn’t know

  These truths of why life is the way it is.

  Today and Tomorrow

  Today, of all your days, you might decide

  To certify that you are happy,

  By which I mean you woke beside

  Some gentle other, dreamlike. Not too scrappy,

  I guess, to say

  That every casual sight seems swarming

  With sudden zest, a sway

  You fall in step with, feeling new attachment forming?

  Tomorrow, you’re aware, awaits and may be less

  Uplifting, more

  The old defeat. Yet what’s in store

  You’re energised to meet with open arms

  Because, though metros roar and troubles roll, love’s mess

  Has shown its true serene.

  Now all alarms

  Fall silent. Life r
enews. Far hills are stippled green.

  Yes, it’s high time to stir and look alive.

  Daredevil hoverflies converge

  On motley light. Clumped thistles thrive,

  Expulsing purplish petals. Here the surge

  Of rompered spring

  Is on the breeze and in the hedge,

  Insistent: ‘Anything

  Can happen.’ Unselfconscious, songbirds start to fledge.

  You feel perhaps you are, of all those ever born,

  The most impelled

  By love, how all its liftings meld

  And concentrate belief toward a point

  And how that feeling spreads like wind through endless corn,

  Which guides the spirit on

  Till out of joint

  With Earth at first, but then – most present when it’s gone.

  The Garden

  I used to walk here any hour,

  The throw-it-in moment or throwaway break.

  I’d spare a thought for every flower,

  Inspecting each stem for its intricate sake,

  And was at peace,

  A pressureless release:

  A sense of floating through the haze

  Of branches to find, in the twist of a leaf,

  An endless fold of future days

  Unfurling their fronds with delighted relief,

  With feeling free

  To grow, unchecked, and be.

  Returning, changed, I’m energised

  At once by a thrill I imagined had flown

  When childhood went. It was disguised,

  Though I thought it had died. Now the weathering stone

  And wheeling skies

  Inform me otherwise.

  It stands. It stuns. It resurrects

  A carnage of red in the shade of an oak,

  A frenzied flash the lake reflects,

  A dragonfly’s glide and a shivering yoke

  Of yellow heat

  That wires me. Pause. Repeat.

  Promise and Compromise

  Consider now, though seeming our most lost