The Wave Hennets: Illusions
SQUINTING AT THE STEREOSCOPE CARD
If you squint at the stereoscope card,
strangely the church far away looks the nearest.
With the trees by the river, it makes it hard
judging exactly where they're to be because
all the leaves in this nearby laurel are pressed
through them, like holes. The closest branch of all draws
a crevasse through the space, that is a mile deep —
it is the Grand Canyon, a hand wide. You could,
if you had to, exist in this world and keep
everything steady — it would be just as good
too. Perhaps someone has. No one could have checked.
Just imagine if time had the same effect.
3-D SPECTACLES ILLUSION
With my spectacles on, should there be red print
there on the TV screen next to some blue, I
see the red as an inch nearer, a strange squint
forced on my 3-D vision by the lenses
that I wear. So extrapolate — red is high,
blue must fall back wherever I look. Cherries
against blue paper leap to the eye, but plums
placed on a red one flatten. Lips look full and
blue eyes are deep, should I stare. Geraniums
startle and violets hide. The stop lights stand
forth the sharper, and skies have no boundary.
Ask what else that one sees that one cannot see.
VISUAL ANOMALY
On the top of the balcony rail, I see
water reflecting the tree beyond, a strip
of the sky and the branches. Its silvery
slit is a-quiver with rapid waves, but, when
it falls still, the reflected space seems to snip
right through my vision, for the 3-D depth is then
as extended as far as the tree, a gap
trenched in my sight, anomalous crack between
the firm rail and familiar snow, my map
torn into two, my world revealed as a screen,
as if depth was a fraud that photons transmit,
as if sight was a televised counterfeit.
FALSE DEPTH FROM REFRACTION
At the edge of this Mediterranean
beach, there are low, utterly transparent waves
coming in. At full rise, the speckled-even
slope of fine pebbles falls away so gently
from the feet, but as soon as the water laves
highest, has splashed my feet, objectivity
starts undoing, for, as the water withdraws,
thinning refraction, the solid shore unfolds:
it goes shrinking away. I had thought the cause
only the dragging of pebbles down; those golds,
pearls and umbers go tumbling, but not enough.
Thus, one's judging the Real becomes less rough.
SQUINT RIVALRIES
Squint a red over green and see the struggle.
Edges are dithering, awkward in being
thus united, and red becomes a shuffle
flushing a green, or a green a red. Sometimes
they take sides: where they meet is no agreeing,
no calm compounding to brown, for neither chimes
with the other, yet blurring occurs, merging
mocking with rivalry that refuses to
be a reddish-green, each one locked in urging
choice where no choice is. For the eyes to view
this frustration is strain. Type of comedy
if the doubling is loosed; if not, tragedy.
CLEMATIS SKULL
Saw white clematis flowers nodding not in
time on their springy stems, all proving the wind
in their own way. How charming! One had a chin,
though, no — a jaw — and the flower was a skull
for the nonce, Yorick's sconce, and, what's more, it grinned,
waggled its chops much too fast, as if to gull
anyone who was watching that it truly
lived and could joke, set the table on a roar
with the best, or, much worse, pretended coolly
death could be life. I refused this semaphore —
saw the flower. Skull returned, though — had me at bay,
till I gave up the struggle and looked away.
FACES EVERYWHERE
You don't have to be Arcimboldo making
faces from fruit, nor Zwankmeyer
out of cutlery, nor commercials faking
heads out of lawns, or lions from chocolate.
You see faces wherever you like. The fire
isn't the only place where inanimate
objects goggle and grin — you were caught staring,
letting your memory stray. Here are some trees
in their winter intricacy: they've glaring
features of black nerve and bone, and, when the breeze
shifts, they wink, if you let them. Play with the light.
But be ready — there's peril hidden in sight.
RUBBING MY EYES
When I rub my eyes hard, it begins. A field
tenny, cross-hatched in patches with brown-purple
chessboards, diamonds, chevrons, is soon revealed,
peppered with firework turquoise dots. Geometric
patterns flicker and fuse on this internal
canvas, computer-like. It's some narcotic
vision had by a layer of mosaic,
arithmetician, printer of Arabian
textile intricate-knotted, but in prosaic
sand-colour, inlaid with puce. Cornucopian
the persistent variety, all in me.
Shows the brain must use rhythms to help it see.
AFTER-IMAGE
After dashing my eyes across the dazzle
(brilliant sunlight on these waves), I can see,
with my eyes closed, the after-image, purple
scrolls with heraldic foldings — no illusion,
but an accurate record, not a degree
out, of the way I moved, of the reaction
of the rods and the cones of my retina,
state of the waves, state of the sunlight, the air,
just how long I looked, and more — Earth set in a
singular angle with respect to the Sun!
To perceive from this trick would be quite a fuss —
but all knowledge we gain is still up to us.
INSIDE OUT
Turn a moon picture upside-down, and every
crater becomes a raised disc. That hollow mask
shows a face just as solid inside. Copy
holes with what fills them. Leave your print in the snow.
Write your tyre treads with rain. Fit wine to the cask.
Feel the concave dome. Press the intaglio
in the wax and your seal is a bas-relief.
Waves go by halves. Where the pendulum swing drives
in defiance is where it's really a thief
hiding its jealous passion for prison gyves
in the curve of its reach. It must go on beating
on through time to prevent the extremes meeting.
THROUGH HALF-CLOSED EYES
Through half-closed eyes all the lamps are sprouting
trumpets of transparent golden glass, above, below,
swivelling compass-needles. There's no doubting
that they are real — Forget the lamps and they're not
a distortion, but truth of where light-rays go
here inside eyes. See how their swivellings plot
the position of eye and head. Delicate
bouncings of crystal mouths record exactly
the degree to which eyelids will nictitate,
with such precision, can't say it's mere fancy
or illusion — which Hopkins' words don't belie:
'To-fro tender trambeams truckle at the eye.'
NO MIRROR-IMAGE
Saw in image reflected that wasn't true.
There in the water a window was dazzling
with the sun: the same window in direct view
had no such dazzle. The real thing was a blank,
a dark pane, quite opaque. I found it baffling —
Here was a mirror-image playing a prank
on the eyes. A mysterious light, nowhere
else, that was blinding me out of an unreal
space, the brightest of all, an insistent glare
drawing a red wriggling track on sight, a weal
that burned over the world. Had to look elsewhere
but then, when I looked back, was no longer there.
VISUAL PARADOX
Through the vertical blinds, half-open, I tried
focusing steadily on the path about
ninety feet off, but it would not coincide
straight with itself. Made a line like the pattern
of splay footprints, and worse, the colours were out,
interfered with — it was the ghost-woven
blind that doubled across them. Focused my eyes
next on the blinds and the path ran straight again
but was helplessly blurred. Was no compromise:
clear but not straight, straight but not clear. Felt the strain
of the paradox. Life can bring into view
such sights when there is no resolving the two.
WITHOUT GLASSES
Without glasses, they say, the world becomes blurred.
But to ignore what is blurred lets you observe
just what blurring itself really is. Not furred,
but encased in three boxes this tall chimney,
that one made out of cellophane, and they swerve
neatly with each swerving. This bird-bumblebee
is a puff that is thumping. The clouds' merging
merges the more, but the blue is just the same
as with spectacles. Window-frames converging
chequer themselves. This rose is a frozen flame
where the petals are sharing each other's hue.
Can examine with ease a short-sighted view.
MIGRAINE’S FORTIFICATION PATTERNS
The name’s ‘fortification patterns’. Migraine
sufferers get them. In the visual field,
on the left, a small zig-zag, there in the brain,
not in the outside world. It flickers, livid
in harsh purples and greens. Slowly it’s revealed:
widening angles, tripling its lines, a grid
like the chevrons that glare, shivering, metamorphic
rocks on bad television, Jazz-Age mental
frieze that is traveling, still. Were I not sick —
headache insistent that it now be central —
I’d tell Wittgenstein (it’s no paradox)
of the beautiful beetle in my matchbox.
FORTIFICATION PATTERN (WITHOUT MIGRAINE)
I have 'fortification patterns' without
migraine, so, coolly, here goes: they're flickering
trapezoids and triangles, a Jazz Age show,
crawling golds and faint pinks in a curve, that run
first one way, another, in a bickering
moiré that hides vision in oblivion
that's kinetic with mirrors cylindrical,
conical, scampered over with runes, chevrons,
mathematical symbols that are symbol
only for me as I find comparisons —
in themselves automatic and blank, chatter
out of nothing, no more than senseless matter.
'FLOATERS' AND 'LUMINOUS DUST'
When I gaze at the sky, I can see a 'floater',
'luminous dust', and the sky. Floaters, fibrous
jelly lodged in the eye's vitreous humour,
lackey its jerkings, swaying like acrobats
on trapezes that swing upside down, nervous
rubbery icicles. The 'dust', sparking gnats,
though they shimmy at speed, are each surrounded
trimly with Newton's Rings, vanishing targets
with a bull's-eye of glint, illusion grounded
secretly true to something, their pirouettes
perhaps trails of the blood where vessels entwine.
Every part of the field's a natural sign.
SENSING
Make scarlet of this wave; of that, lark-song.
Tweaked by a lens, twinned by retinal ichor,
netted in then as pulses to nerves, along
them to the fibre-chambers where I become
that fine scarlet, an invisible phosphor
gives me its rhythm. Blocked and absorbed by drum,
shrunk to miniature tappings, rocking on bone,
netted by nerve to electrical pulsing
(just the same as before), audio-phone
is what I am, that shrill brilliance, trilling
from inaudible quiverings of deaf air.
So these wonders are me! So what's the waves' share?
THROUGH DARK GLASSES
Through the dark glasses, panes of the Volvo car
cast a succession of coloured bands over
the sky, vast rainbow vertical stains, bizarre
tints of electrical sour intensity
in a Hindu mode, spanning from a bitter
topaz to tingling mauve, from a graffiti-
bold crimson, theatrical green, into
bruise-blue, in pillars going straight horizon-
zenith, colourspouts tinged with a Goodman-grue
standing in huge challenge above roof, pylon,
hoarding, blank neon sign, starkly to the eye.
Just as strange in its way, ordinary sky.
SODIUM-VAPOUR LAMPLIGHT
When the sodium-vapour lamps came, so did
buses turn khaki and lips became purple.
All the leaves turned to metal. All the flowers hid
beauty in puce and in buff. Rain held a dye
like a black-orange oil, made every puddle
tarnished and melted fool's-gold. Even the sky
became nicotine-stained, and the clouds were dunes.
Faces were Chinese. How could light falsify
what it showed? But it didn't. As in the moon's
silver we saw a new range of colour lie
there revealed; thus did sodium scrutinize.
There the Real was displayed in another guise.
DIFFRACTION COLOURS ON A GRAMOPHONE RECORD
Hold the record on edge: see the diffraction
split up the light — gorgeous reds that are purples
with the shifting of hands; feel the attraction
greens paradisal exert; all hues turn gold
at a Midas touch, or the finger trembles
gold into halcyon blue. Just how you hold
these fine grooves to the light governs colouring.
There are no colours at all on the vinyl,
nor on pigeon's or drake's neck, butterfly wing,
bubble, old glass, oil on water. Eyes distil
out from rhythm an ichor that sweetens sight,
tingeing colourless waves with a living light.
RAINBOW
See the rainbow move with you? Not the rainbow,
for it’s a pattern shifting through the raindrops,
so renewed at each step. This pure-perfect glow,
easily named as one thing, is different
for each eye, never mind each person. It stops
just as the moon does when you stop, a present
iridescence, a sequent independence
seemingly sure in its public truth, a cheat
that's concealing its privacy. Opulence
brazenly distant, in your brain its deceit
is vibrating a labyrinth entity.
See its metaphor trap your identity.
WATERFALL RAINBOW
Standing out from the waterfall a rainbow.
Being, dependent on what passes through it.
Out of nowhere a steady peacock-glow,
dashed at a whim, extinguished, moving only
at the moment that I do. Drops renew it.
Plunging parabolas beyond it, fleecy
cauldrons boiling on every ledge, upwhirling
vapours below it, yet in all this abandon
it stands fixed, its existence bound to hurling,
flying, surrendering, blind agitation.
A calm flame, a still salmon, is what I see.
When I leave, it is I make them cease to be.
MOVEMENT SEEN OTHERWISE
As I cycle along, the telephone wires
scissor like two rapiers that slide over each
other. What is not-tree is sometimes sapphires
shattered from sky-blue; then, like a screen-divide
that goes vertical-left, ceramic stones reach
all through the not-tree, made of slate. Cars don't hide
the cement kerb — the kerb is a railway-train
rushing below me — and behind this parked car,
see the last coach in swift retreat. And again
look, the not-trees, made of other not-trees, are
now of not-sky (a cloud). Our habit affects
to consider the world as made up of objects.
CHANGING THE SPEED ON THE VIDEO
When the video's fast, all the people jerk
puppetwise, nodding and wincing, scampering
like pernickety insects, each smile a smirk,
every gesture perfunctory. A face
is pulled hundreds of times as if hampering
speech and not furthering it. Now change the pace
to a slow one and they walk as do giraffes,
swaying portentously, solemn pendulums;
all expressions depression, all words, all laughs
turned into sighs; winks close eyes; mouths bare their gums
in a snarling of hours. How lucky we are
to go just at a speed that isn't bizarre!
EYE-FIXATIONS
As you cycle along past the trees, which twig
do your eyes fix upon? All the others will
move — they circle around it, dancing a jig,
yours at the centre. And these starlings pecking
at odds, turn like a record around the still
one you have chosen to watch. Change the setting
of attention — the still one shifts. You can swap
this way and that, bestow motion and stillness
as you wish. Like a god you can start and stop
all that you see. The whole landscape lies helpless
to command, can exist in no other guise —
someone else, though, may look with different eyes.
TURNING WORLD
On TV in the BBC title they
used once a turning globe, but you could see through
because only the continents showed as grey
shadows — the oceans transparent. I found that,
with a little determination, soon you
could, at a thought, make it reverse. Your fiat
brought the back to the front, and the front to back.
Earth was now turning right against time — the years
rediscovered, the past now the future's track,
and all the future refused and all its fears
gone. If one met up with the troubles of then,
at a blink the whole world could turn back again.
CLOUDS IN A GALE
Gale force winds. To the left the drift of trailed clouds,
delicate-still to each other, finest shreds
that are torn to exactly the faintest shrouds
fixed in the wind, while trees are in agony
with their rooted frustrations. In zincs and leads,
steels, aluminiums, the sullen canopy
is in furrows like giant frowns. Ahead, broad
clouds seem to rise from the horizon, upside-
down waves, heading for breaking. But we're aboard —
land is a vast ship, trees are masts, and we glide
underneath past the waves. It is our motion
that is wrenching the trees, not the sky's ocean.
HOUSE AS SHIP
There's a gale today, clouds moving at hectic
pace all together, whether the grey zeppelins
hurtling sidelong above or the candlewick
strips underneath being slowly unravelled
as they fly in formation. But what begins
here at the top of the window? I travelled
then an instant! — I stare concentratedly.
Suddenly house and I are in motion now,
not the clouds. It's a ship I'm in, splendidly
sailing at speed. There's our clothes-washer somehow
become engine, two panes suggesting the bridge
that I'm on. It's like language's sortilege.
STROBOSCOPE EFFECTS
Saw a loudspeaker lit by a stroboscope.
Slowly it urged itself out and in, miming
its own rapid vibrations, a solemn trope,
keeping in step, seen not as an illusion:
like a metaphor deadened by its chiming
over the years, it caused us no confusion
of appearance and real—we took it as quite
literal, almost as solid to touch. Just so
falling drops from a tap will stand in the air,
spoked wheels go backwards, and, if they should zero
all a stroboscope's flashes right in the eye,
then their phantasmagoria will not lie.
MOIRÉ ILLUSION
As you drive past two fences — say, on a bridge
on the motorway — you've noticed, haven't you,
how the two patterns play out an average
of themselves: there goes sliding through them a ghost
ripple, shade against light. See it fly askew
all those uprights. The fixed space between one post
and another is concertina'd narrow
and then wide in a blurring smoothness. You've made
it yourself: if you stop, you'll see them all go
back to straight match and clash, as if they're afraid
of a compromise, finding it quite absurd.
It's called 'moiré' or 'moira' or some such word.
HAND ON A LORRY'S WINDSCREEN
There's a hand coloured day-glo orange. It's stuck
right in the middle of that lorry's windscreen.
It is waving at you and wishing you luck,
free with its greetings (since it doesn't know you),
so don't ask what a gesture like that can mean —
you are the one that has to make it come true.
It's your eyes that see ditherings as cheery
wobbles that measure an engine's vibrations,
and a road's lack of pure uniformity
turned into uncanny impersonations
of the friendliest intercourse — say, Jack,
you might wonder what way it's best to wave back.
A BARBER'S POLE
There's a barber's pole spiralling upwards, though
nothing is rising. Diamonds bold and red
(or perhaps you could call them white ones) go
shooting for flight. Strange to see them disappear
into nowhere. You'd swear they weren't gone: instead
up in invisible air they all career
to the sky to some cloudy climax. But still
pulled to the base once more, the eye
has to fly with the spiral against its will,
hopelessly fighting to hold what's turning by
in full view out of sight. You're trapped from Monday
to the weekend. They switch it off on Sunday.
ON A TREADMILL
On a treadmill the ground moves. Though you
stride along, confident, hopeful, putting all
of your energy forward, all this ado
gets you as far as the Red Queen and Alice.
Makes a fool of each foot, its skill at a stall
when it's convinced of success. Such artifice
wasn't put in the program — the universe
doesn't allow for such basic reversal,
fundamental deceit — and, worse, to coerce
you to perform on it with no rehearsal
of just what is involved, no, not even once
(and the doctor is checking your heart's response).
HOLOGRAM ON A CREDIT-CARD
On an old credit-card, there in a corner
Beethoven, pictured in hologram. A turn
up and down sends him flushing through each colour,
scarlet to violet: side to side, and this
solid head moves to face me although the stern
eyes looking right won't switch to mine. Artifice
has put depth in a flat plane, uncannily
fitting the head inside my finger behind.
If I turn it too far, his face murkily
darkens, then flashes a mirror where I find
a faint negative only. After a test,
found that one eye could see the illusion best.
TANGIBLE PUNS
They are selling a mouse for a computer
shaped like a mouse — see, the wire can be the tail,
the two eyes are the switches. Perhaps cuter,
these woolly slippers, stuffed up inside, are turned
with these talons to monster's paws. This huge nail
fastens a log to a log until you've learned
that its end is a ballpoint. Give this teapot
feet and a pair of shoes and you'd think households
could just walk off and leave you. At school his blot
scared you until you picked it up. All the moulds
will fit in what they shouldn't, all part of his fun.
And the penis turned round was really a nun.
METAMORPHOSIS OF A PENTEL 'CLIC-ERASER'
Bought a Pentel eraser, 'Clic-Eraser',
tubular rubber extending when needed.
For example, as now. Left it, when teacher,
out on the desk in the lab. (I was paying
individual notice to interested
pupils, and those uninterested displaying
their disinterest or dissembling it for peer
group automatic approval.) Much later,
found the Pentel a penis, the image clear,
inked in — division at the top, a border
for the foreskin, and folds, But what perfection! —
To make Teacher's eraser an erection.
VICTORIAN TABLE
At the feet of the Victorian table,
paws. They were carved to show the claws, the polished
walnut missing the sharpness but quite able,
given the smoothness of wood, to be a match
for the smoothness of claw — one would not have wished,
surely, for claws that did have the power to scratch,
perhaps maul, the unwary diner. For look,
fringes of tassel could transmogrify to
fur — computer-transform the top, let it crook
downwards for tail here, turn upwards there to do
for the head. Then the knives! — It would end the feast.
The domestic arena would have its beast.
TELEVISION SCREEN
Those 625 lines, flicking
second by second over the screen, divide
all our vision in digital strips, tricking
us into seeing faces and smiles and hate
and blue skies and red blood. Mechanisms hide
under advertisements, soaps, affairs of state,
and we're fooled into taking it as given,
looking through cameras just like spectacles,
as forgotten as readily, pleased to be driven
in the familiar way, mere vehicles
in our turn like the tube itself. Take caution:
interference drags image to distortion.
MOVITYPE (I)
On the movitype you see letters running
all right to left, pulling your reading with them.
They are letters, no doubt of it, no punning,
trickery, cunning — all plain as day, as clear
as a thing to the hand, a solid datum
moving in certitude, as logically sheer
as a shadow against what casts it. But go
close and then closer: Can you see the miniature
lamps, a matrix of flashings? Can you see one
here and one there that are dimmer? — Just measure
our attention on them. You'll see something strange:
that the motion's no more than an interchange.
MOVITYPE PANEL (II)
On this Movitype panel advertisements
showed things as moving — arrows flying about,
or a can growing bigger — dancing events
out to entrance you with firework spectacle.
There was one of a lollipop roundabout,
discs that revolved. Saw within them a stipple
on the matrix that twinkled and flashed. Nothing
moved. Only lights winking on and off that fooled
one's perception to charge them with glittering
motion. By choice, the mind at turns overruled
both the discs and the lamps with strict precision.
And so now, do the same with simple vision.
LIGHTNING
Lightning. When we have seen it, it's gone, printed
both on the sky and the retina. We're braced
for the tree of the thunder from that tinted
cloud to branch toppling explosions that will thud
in your lungs, but the instant silence is traced
down from above by a livid nerve, the scud
of the clouds jammed to stillness, tributary
filaments, anguished meanders glowing like
pain's unyielding reminder, a stationary
flame through a crack in a furnace, fractured spike
from the past, in the skull brightly branded, scored,
so the sky's equilibrium be restored.
FLAGS
A computer-wind blows through the Anglia
flag on TV. At the UN a real wind
makes patterns of states seek utopia,
ever unwrinkling to form the perfect flat
picture. Unmoved only on that school wall, pinned.
Waved in the hand, even democrat
flags can play at the patriot game. You wave
happy together the very same waving
and it waves you the thought that you are no slave.
Ruling the waves, all the flags are behaving
alike, law on the wind, colouring each gust.
They droop, honoured, in church, decaying to dust.
SEEING WATER
When the water's transparent, utterly clear,
wonder about utterness. You couldn't see
an invisible water: it would appear
nowhere. It's only because light-waves reflect
from its sensitive glass a facsimile
forest you know it's not forest. You suspect
a straight oar that has cracked without being cracked,
roots that are not only twisted but twisting
all their twists. Not a sight that you can call fact,
flowing like that, unless you call it flowing.
So you won't see the bed instead of the brook
if you're ready to look into how you look.
VAPOUR-TRAIL
It's a vapour-trail. Single row of knitting.
m's in a handwriting manual. A hedge
of bouquets. A third expressed in recurring
decimals. Tyre-track in snow. A gathered seam.
It's no wonder, for turbines at command fledge
icy serenity into a regime
of impossible heat, stir utility
out of material blankness, write order
in the chaos, wrest fruit from futility.
Matter's no matter once used. See the border
is beginning to smudge. Withered the bouquet,
symbols blur, records fade, and the edges fray.
MIRROR TO MIRROR
Put two mirrors to face each other. There'd be
me as a Chinese snake or all the banners
in a curving procession, pictures of me
coming from nowhere miles away out of green
ocean mist. Was as if some quick enchanter's
wand had gone poking a hole in the real scene
and that really you came out of that cavern
foggy and watery. Your hands' tremblings made
the long line whip around, so the end would turn,
stopping you seeing the first. Made you afraid,
each one seeing the back of a head, for why
couldn't I see just where was set my own eye?
READING TWO DIFFERENT TIMES ON THE SAME CLOCK AT THE SAME TIME
If you let your eyes slide very fast over
digital clocks that run on alternating
current, there on your retina each number
printed in sequence, so you see 55
and then 56 minutes, and not flashing —
no, in a row, steady. So the two times arrive
at the same time, it seems. Truth is, images
linger — they can't change fast enough — make one time
out of what is, in fact, more, This paper is
nearer in time than your foot. That wall must prime
rods and cones before trees outside, though light's fast.
You see further and further into the past.
ARE YOU CAPTURING THE REAL?
There are children, so-called backward, who take a
'b' for a 'd' and vice versa: rather say,
they are good at reflections. If you fake a
smile, there's no way to be sure that isn't what
you should really be doing. The cuckoo may
really be saying 'Oo-cuck!' Pull at that knot,
but be careful, you may be tightening it.
'Keen-ell-fer' catches us all out if we say
it through over and over again. A wit
trips you up with words you have said. You can waylay
you as well, make the self that you thought yours, mine.
As the world goes on turning, what's a date-line?
PLAYING THE RECORD BACKWARDS
Put the pick-up across to the other side;
Start in the middle. The music plays backwards.
It was like a harmonium. Notes would slide,
wheezing and gasping. Tunes would go the wrong way
like a donkey's hee-hawing, like a drunkard's
drone. Every rhythm seemed to suffer delay
and an increase of speed the very same time.
words of a foreign language came in the song,
with "Ee-yup!' and 'Ee-yap!' as a kind of rhyme.
I used to wonder if, when I got it wrong,
there was someone for whom it wasn't awry.
He went backwards in time and passed us all by.
TINNITUS
It is fortunately temporary. Inside
ear is a high and persistent piccolo,
sometimes changing its note, growing amplified
over the background of supposedly real
(or the intersubjectively sure) echo
eardrums are thrumming with. But the 'sounds' conceal
what is no more than motion, a vibration
pressured in air, oh so subtly, from stretched cord
and tympanum and impact and gyration,
friction, explosion, (we can name it!), all scored
in the memory, reached by circuitous
causal route, all betrayed by this tinnitus.
ECHOES
In the mountains an echo. You shout to hear
self from the distance. Who is that, far away?
In the mocking exactness it comes too near.
Are you just where you think you think? The mimic
is not thrown by your word -- shout 'Caloo-calay!',
nonsense is rendered purely, a lunatic
automatic retort overlaying your
next self-experiment. There's no altering
what has gone. Disappointing, like an encore,
tempted to echo itself in echoing,
ever fainter and farther. Hear it go on
to the future, the past no oblivion.
PUBLIC DREAM
(FOR PROFESSOR NORMAN MALCOLM)
At the front of the car in the passenger
seat, fell asleep with my eyes open. The rain
on the windscreen blurred by the windscreen-wiper
changed in a dream into a firework-display:
roman candles in red, amber, green; my brain
brilliant with chromium explosions, holiday
rockets, strangely in pairs; the organizers
cleverly printed words on the sky like real
neon signs, save that letters like chandeliers
rhythmically flashed; sometimes a catherine-wheel
spun its sparks overhead. But how could you tell?
Here's a dream that the driver witnessed as well.
WAVE DREAM
Can't I do complete justice to that swimming?
Think of that! — 'complete justice' : What? — to crystal
waves, not frozen, though clarity was brimming
into snow in that purely voluptuous
garden, splash from iron ice into that ripple-
jewelled space where no cold locked that flexuous
free releasing of limbs bound to a power
that was bearing them where I wanted to go
over green grass below, wish-flying over
waves that swayed grass that swayed waves in so
double-tumbling a plunge, and warm, to come
to the law-bound coast of morning left me quite numb.
DREAM REVERSAL
In a dream were the sea and the air, but turned
upside-down, and all the sea had become air
and the air become sea. Together they churned
just as before, but all the bubbles of froth
were now water-spheres, all interlocking their
silver air-surfaces. Up above, a broth
of a myriad bubbles, all drops in flow,
pausing and linking in skewed uncertain rains.
All the troughs were exalted, the crests made low,
but at the lowest, wind-currents blew sharp veins
of bright glass that was spume down to deep dark
where it spun ever finer to the last spark.
RIVAL VIEWS
Let these both see a cloud — one is a weather-
man and the other a painter — Where does 'the' cloud
begin, end? Or let those see birds together—
this one looks forward to August and the grouse:
as for him, he calls girls 'birds'. A football crowd
gives this one communal ecstasies: madhouse,
is how she sees it, frenzy for a lost myth.
Stars are some points that, unlike the lamps, follow
with the car: he looks up seeking the zenith,
dreaming of infinite spaces. Mistletoe
is a parasite, pallid-berried: don't miss
any chance in the candlelight — you can kiss.
CAUSE AND EFFECT
The iron filings are bristling — there's a magnet
under the paper; the moustache turns upwards
if you move it a bit. The cause is secret
yet the effect betrays it. You're looking at
an electron performance on the hundreds
of minute phosphor cells, not at Krazy Kat
on the TV reviving after one more
bang from the world. 'The trouble I have with him,'
says the teacher, unable not to ignore
lead that the child breathed in. Dickens' Tiny Tim
is put right when old Scrooge turns charitable,
but a Muppet's a puppet profitable.
CARRYING WORLDS AROUND
In the plane we were steady: the horizon
was what was tilted, the earth at an angle.
After all, how you read the phenomenon
rests on your judgement of where you think you are.
Both the plane and the earth cannot but tangle
with how I see how they are. If you go far
enough, neither the 'plane' or the 'earth' need be
singled for notice. Which way up is a 'cloud'?
Which way up is the sun? All day we carry
worlds around, fitting them to what is allowed
by continua flowing their way like flint.
It's the same with this poem locked in the print.
ELECTRIC SIGNS
They are ghost-like, the neon-signs. Luminous
tremors in tubes, cloudy-unearthly, snaking
on their skeleton-scaffolds, libidinous
messages fountaining, cursive, convulsive,
flashing on, flashing off, busily faking
fireworks or foam, advertizing laxative,
cigarette, iPod, spectacles — something for
every orifice, garnished with sparkles.
Where those letters run on, don't think all you saw,
reading so helplessly nothing but jingles,
could be all that there was. If you fix your eye,
you'll see light-bulbs inside that glow and die.
HELIUM VOICE
Was a joke on the parents. Our son, taking
us on a tour of the Cavendish, asked us
to breathe in from a tube. My voice was breaking,
this time to treble, to an unrecognized
squawk like speeded-up tape. His aim to non-plus
habit-authority caught it mesmerized
by its failure to be where identity
spoke at its surest. Even the laugh was tripped
into laughing at self. All one's quiddity
turned into oddity. All protest was gypped
by repeating its cause. One beheld a truth —
of the elder who wished to return to youth.
SPECTACLE CAT
Looked up. Shocked by the sight of cat. In a
second it turned back — to my glasses upside
down that reflected the lamp. They can twin a
light, this one round with a grille, tint it to green
(there is some kind of coating): thus, a green-eyed
cat was intent upon me. I saw I'd seen
a trapezium there right in the middle
and a black V (in the frame) as the cat's nose.
Wouldn't go, though, the image, stayed as riddle,
ghost or the Cheshire Cat. The illusion froze
in the bodiless space, a menacing play
as the curious cat that won't look away.
LEONARDO DA VINCI'S ADVICE
Leonardo da Vinci told the student
'Look at an old wall covered with cracks, lichen,
moss, damp patches, and mould. Then experiment —
see all the shapes as other than they really
are — this patch, perhaps, shield; that, cavalrymen
charging the rampart; this crack, spear; those mossy
clumps the interlocked infantry — thus a conflict
paints itself out of the wall.' In the same way
all you see as you read is what you depict:
print can turn picture — this line is a railway
with each word become wagon. What is the freight?
Why, again only you can value its weight.
THE DUCK-RABBIT
If you put the Duck-Rabbit next to a hutch,
rabbit is what you'll see, but put by a pond
and it quacks. Take the Rubin vase: you just touch
up with a few flowers on top and it's vase;
put two ears and two eyes and it is beyond
doubt those two profiles. With clues, memory bars
other pictures, unless you make a special
effort. What effort? Just imagine next to
the Duck-Rabbit both hutch and pond Reversal
lies then in your hands. Flowers and eyes will do
just the same for the vase. The same equation
will assist when you face the next persuasion.
SEEING THROUGH ILLUSIONS
In the water a bent stick that isn't bent —
No, what is shown by the bend is the water.
Through this glass there aren't two lines; It's evident
glass isn't glass — it's calcite. Far down the street
is a mirage, a dazzling pond — you're clever
knowing it isn't an illusion of heat
for you're seeing how hot the air is. Mirrors
never betray themselves: it isn't your face
you're reflecting upon — no, it's the silver's
flatness and smoothness. The moon's up there is space
without doubt; surely there's no need to explain
that its beautiful light is part of your brain.
THE MODEL VILLAGE IN BOURTON-ON-THE-WATER
In this village, a model of the village,
prettily miniatured, cosily Cotswold,
where the doll's house, the toy farm, the saddle bridge,
tiny signs, posters and by-law notices
that tell no one the needful, keep to the mould
round where you stand, completing artifice's
trim exactitude, lies exactly where you stand.
Model of model, true to original
and original, so that its fairyland
certainty models the model of model.
But the fourth? and the fifth? If it's completed,
you are there in infinity, repeated.
DAY-GLO COLOURS
How insistent! How daubed on humble colour!
Swipes of ice-burn blue, weals of acid pink,
searing orange and branded red, a greener
green than green, purple empurpled, yellow
incandescence on cold paper — you would think
night burned in day. Not blending, not mellow,
never shading or soft, a brash salience
lifted by inches towards us, these letters
turn the slogans to shouting, to vehemence,
hectoring rhetoric, bribes that beset us
with their livid intensities. When you gaze,
just remember they're glowing with secret rays.
A LEAF CAUGHT IN A WEB
At the top of the pane, outside, a leaf's caught
stiff in a spider's web, and the wind's blowing
in sharp gusts. A black silhouette that's held taut,
sprung on invisible strings, it's a figure
in a cloak, or a mouse, or a face, showing
back what I see, writing a safe signature.
But convulsive vibrations shake it, strict to
in-and-out throbbings that ignore clouds, window,
or the pull of the Earth, shuttling a tattoo
flutteringly silent, and now it's throe on throe,
not of leaf seen as this or that — What they write
isn't safe, and I wince away from the sight.
'SHONE IN MY EARS THE LIGHT OF SOUND,
CALLED IN MY EYES THE SOUND OF LIGHT'
[Dylan Thomas]
All the landscape a symphony. Turn the head,
violins swirl; with that hill's rise the cellos
begin surging, and with that dazzle outspread
sharp trills, fortissimo, reveal the ripples
of a lake; as trees swing, their slow legatos
counterpoint choirs against choirs. The birds' whistles
are swift zigzags of silver over twinklings
made by those further and further off. The breeze
in the leaves becomes horizontal sprinklings,
sequin-confetti, iridescent; a frieze
of a pulsing bright gold-dust, the surf; a voice
in a song makes a tremulous flame rejoice.
FALSE COIN?
In the fifty-pence pieces Sainsbury's gave
me there was one the right head but wrong tail —
was a ruin, an arch. What sort of a wave
does such a coin make? Was inscribed 'Bailiwick
of the Island of Jersey' — change from a sale,
tendered as legal. What sort of word could trick
you like that? — be as truth in one place, but lie,
here in another. And was the cashier clear
in her ignorance, seeming true? Was she sly,
piling up true over false? Words can draw fear
whether speakers are guilty or innocent,
and you're caught with a coinage that's fraudulent.
TRUE AND FALSE PHOTOGRAPHS
In the Dover edition of A Treatise
on Language, Alexander Bryan Johnston,
are two photographs by which we recognize
Johnston, a linguist alert for the deceit
of the word and the image. Just one person,
stiff in Victorian pose to fix a neat
and exact reproduction of truth. But lo! —
something peculiar: for one's a mirror-
image, facing the wrong way, but you don't know
which one it is! A fastidious observer
might object, saying one was false and one true,
at which Johnston would laugh — "You know who is who!"