The Multiverse

by Andrew Wynn Owen

  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,

  You feel the sky is glass,

  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 –?
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  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).