The Wave Hennets: Patterns
THE SKY IN KOYANNISQATSI
In the film called Koyannisqatsi the sky
speeded up. Clouds tumbled over horizons
in stampedes, became waterfalls from on high;
fat dolphins, miles thick, were leap-frogging ridges;
there were county-broad duvets ripped on canyons,
rivers of mist in spate, wind-torn packages
shedding stuffing across plains. The strangest thing,
clouds would develop to vanish to appear
once again, struggling in and out of being,
tearing their hair into nothing. A huge sphere
of a moon was balloon, alive in blue space,
with the skyscrapers turning past its scarred face.
MACKEREL SKY
It's a mackerel sky — or are they cirrus
fish? One thing's sure: fish that didn't resemble
all the silver and shadow in that glaucous
space, intertwists of spread and intensity
of the sun's rays refracted by the supple
surface, have not survived. In imagery
here's a witness to wave matching wave. This sky,
ruckled by winds that can ruffle seas, now bears
across hemispheres endless convolvings, high
maelstroms, the viewless niagaras of airs
that obey night and day, as ephemeral
as the wave on the back of a mackerel.
THE VISIBLE WIND
In the east wind a dust of snow makes the air
visible (Ascham, advising the archer,
noticed this). It goes slewing askew, like hair
twining in water but streaking in swift sheets,
in fine arrows that sinew aims together —
as to a wand, blurring to surf, into pleats,
into up-plunging shoals, into merry-go-
rounds that shrink in upon themselves into tops
or expand into galaxies, undertow
sucking them back and flinging them down in flops
flat to ground. Just so, wind in summer must drive
its invisible self as wildly alive.
CLOUDS AFTER THE GALE
Now the sky has grown clearer, clouds have become
wraiths. They're all hollows and wisps, holding just so
all their motionless chaos. This, a glass crumb;
that, an old corner spider's-web, or coral
lace dissolving; a translucent skull; or snow
thawing or ice, over a stream. They could model
a forgetting or fading were it not for
their frozen gesture, their perfection of cold
instant pause in a dance, a moment of awe
cancelled because they're all moving in a blindfold
career, not knowing that or where they're riding,
as a seagull, high up, ignores them, gliding.
CRACKED MUD
See the cracks in the mud like a map of roads,
fences and fields on some Asiatic plain.
All the roads go along fairly straight to nodes
where they will suddenly bend, failing to meet
other roads; the two ends are hooked but refrain
from the decisive touch, the way incomplete,
where they each thin to a point like a scribing tool
scribing on nothing. Some can run parallel,
even crooking in parallel, but the rule
holds them to strict division. With goods to sell,
all the peasants can never get to the fair,
and the Emperor's agents fume in despair.
MARBLING
They are skilful at marbling, catching a skin
up from the surface, where, at a mere whim, the whorls
of vermilion, purple, gold, have their spin
printed in fixture. Look at those vagaries
of a point of lost time, forever. Those scrawls
hurrying somewhere have their felicities
of redoubled infolding kept in their coils
flat on the page, crimped like new leaves, but never
to turn brown. What was fluent in living oils,
dizzying eddies that some calligrapher
had got lost in, are down now both still and bright.
Not unlike what might be when this is the sight.
THE BOOK OF SNOWFLAKES
The whole book is entirely devoted to
snowflakes. He photographed hundreds. They were caught
on black velvet, kept cold. Arranged to the view
set in a sequence of hexagonal
spokes and forking stars, doubled, each a cohort
catalogued neatly. He was taking no risks
that an odd one, perhaps broken, partly thawed,
partly refrozen, should mar the collection.
But imagine a Borges book! You'd be awed
by its temerity, seeking perfection
by including them all, with no effort shirked —
but he'd find that no classification worked.
QUARTZ CRYSTALS ON A MINERAL SPECIMEN
It's like one of those air-photos looking straight
down on a city — the perspective splays the
skyscrapers outwards. Feel the precision, weight,
flat unremitting hardness of these crystals
chock-a-block where chance left them. Each obeys the
hidden geometry, jostling its rivals'
own intrusive obedience, set where they
stopped in the lode aeons ago. Transparent
pencils, whittled by rhythms within, in play
still in this changeless script, keeping it constant
to whatever reflections day or night bring.
Like a poem, its atoms silently sing.
ICOSATETRAHEDRON OF GARNET
Gem of garnet. Icosatetrahedron.
Already faceted, too big for a ring —
anyway, near opaque. Down where electron,
proton and neutron interswing their tight waves
there's a crystal of rhythm, time that's spacing,
space that's timing, out of sight, its enclaves
in a vacuum beyond light, dancing Philip Glass,
Steve Reich and Brian Eno, and that crystal
is repeated ad libitum till its mass
grows to detectable size and its model
in perspective, 3-D, and cortical hue
turns the dance to a stone thus still to the view.
WOODGRAIN
How the grain of this wood flows like an ocean! —
only a foot below my eyes as I stand
on a cliff at my desk. Here, without motion,
silky brown waves, glossed by a reading-lamp sun,
are extending the last one's reach up a sand
black-flecked like oak. Out there on the horizon
by my bookshelf, they've concertina'd to knurled
gold where a bookmark coastline lies like leather
with a mountainous wrinkle. Here a curled
comber is foaming out under the paper
as if time rose alive, broke through the veneer,
as if each pencilled line were telling a year.
ESPALIER PLUM
An espalier plum. An Italian word
lies at the root: spalliera, and it means
a 'support'. After all, all you do is gird
up all the branches in this leather bondage
and they grow into line whatever the genes
happen to favour. The fruit and the foliage
grow as straight as a telegraph pole's branches,
taking the gardener's message. See how tough
are the limbs as outstretched, all the anarchies
dared by the rebel shoots docked sharply enough
to ensure a direction. All must comply,
though the wall only leaves it half the sky.
DEAD IVY
See the ivy at first could go anywhere,
tendril so soft and so hooked they would attach
themselves freely to trunk or wall, loll in air
till they have found what to cling to. Then they crawl
pertinaciously up. Every bend they catch,
gripping it tight, test every hole, and install
themselves pat to the template, perfect models
moulded accommodatingly to every
challenge that their support offered. Their grapnels
fixed them forever to the tree. This mazy
net's a wine-bottle's woven husk, stiff and gray,
for the tree that it's killed has rotted away.
CACTUS
Like a fairground with lights, this bristling cactus
ossifies sparkles to thorns spaced out along
the green ribs. This one bulges a fat phallus;
others are fingers supporting a globe not
to be seen; others, globes crossing prong with prong
hooked like harpoons. This one, quartered, is as squat
as four toads, and another sports a flowered
rim like a hydrogen bomb's. Logarithmic
spirals play with the eye as if they're powered
with some mechanical works inside. A prick
traps the skin and breaks off. Plants dry and dusty.
Living difficult lives makes creatures crusty.
NEOLITHIC HAND-AXE
Neolithic hand-axe. Unerring random
sidelong blows, long ago, turned a stone to tool.
Each hard ripple in silica by custom
narrowing down nearer to the gripping hand.
It was turned, eyed, and flaked by unworded rule
snapped to the new lump of the old flint, unplanned
and foreseen. Each conchoidal fracture a shell
grooved with the waves of his muscular effort
in the instant, the place neither he could tell
nor we where force would work best, thoughtless expert
shivings, proved as you lift what's fitting to own,
and mould fingers and thumb and palm to stone.
PUTTING TOOLS IN ORDER
Yes, 'the tool for the job', the woodwork teacher
said. It was lovely to see the files laid out,
all the flat and the round and triangular,
graded by sizes, and the spanners nested
in their slots — fun to place them back without doubt,
fitting in easily. Then there were chested
trays for screws, nails, and nuts and bolts — you could drop
them in according to size so you could reach
for them just when you wanted. Was like a shop,
everything waiting. Of course they had to teach
you the right one to use, so you'd get the knack —
but I used to enjoy so putting them back.
PATTERN INTO RHYTHM
Turn the groove of the record quickly enough
under the needle and the static tracing
makes the music, but, magnified, all the rough
tracks look like tyre-treads. Tobogganing downhill
turns geology right back into racing
swerves, dips and uplifts, where the still becomes thrill
and release. The old skiffle-groups used washing-
boards, where domestic turned lyric. Riveted
girders hold up the roller-coaster. They're sloshing
down in a whirl in the rube, pelleted
in a yellow intestine of plastic in
baths at Butlins at Bognor. Space turns to spin.
CONCERTINAS, ACCORDIONS
Concertinas, accordions, have two hard
parts that you hold, solid handholds with tough straps
that both bind your two hands as a kind of guard
stopping you dropping it, and also provide
a firm backing for when you pull out. No traps,
then, and you don't even feel them as you glide
to the centre impelling imprisoned air
out as from lungs to singing mouths. All those pleats
make a flexible compromise: Folds can share
tension equitably; angles perform feats
of pure curving. Thus, spread wide, or restored
to compression, accordions keep in accord.
PLEATS
Between finger and thumb the wrinkles allow
freedom. A bellows would have no breath without
having fold upon fold. There upon your brow
smiling and frowning, expectation, surprise,
couldn't register; neither certainty, doubt,
nor your spontaneous rage, nor how your eyes
like to look as she's looking, nor how your lips
long to be, are being, are to be, ever
can become what they'll stay, without any slips
under and over. To give in is clever
if you push somewhere else. Iron cracks in defeat.
It's much better to let material pleat.
WRINKLES
On a shoe, on the Himalayas, on Mars,
there on that bird's delicate eyelid, here on
elephants' backs, or our faces, are the bars,
diamonds, criss-cross grooves that we call 'wrinkles'.
Why the synclines and anticlines rise upon
continents over the aeons, why crinkles
automatically knit and unknit to clean
dust from an eye, bending leathers multiply
folds for ease, why a bud crams its leaves between
leaves, or a glacier cracks or lava crimps, why
the aged or the embryo tuck their skin
into creases, is liberty's discipline.
OLD WIRE MESH
Bit of old wire mesh, falling apart. This wire,
all its length, waves. Its point catches to no point,
where before all these frizzled hairs in a lyre
locked every difference into a unity.
They distributed strain; each joint felt each joint
give, not to give. Where now this finger can pry,
making looser the random strands like waves in shallows,
widening as if through a magnifying glass,
all the unders and overs, all the trim rows
knotted in compromise against what might pass,
once resilient as will, now show barb and gap,
every kink as a wince as they fall to scrap.
FOLDS
By the crest of each wave were smaller waves pressed
on by its force, like triple underlining
as an emphasis. Notice as you undressed
cloth rumpled up, storing strain. When scraping paint
off the door, saw the shavings were crimped. Folding
hills, Himalayas, double to ease constraint.
Inside gneiss, metamorphic, all the squeezing
under the volcanic heat has made squirming
solid, packed as in the cortex, where easing
kept all the parallels in the mad firming
of a stone. See smooth snow crumple in prudence
as you staggered to hold on to your balance.
STRESS FOLDS
Pulling cling film. At corners corrugations
try to ease tension. With glasses on I see
iridescence in perspex, the vibrations
turned into gold-ruby-green that I can shift
like the colours in bubbles; a fleur-de-lys
twitches to dandelion-leaf as fingers lift
away pressure. All drapery folds to show
weakness and strength. Look up: the mackerel sky
shows where forces contended. The breezes blow
Lyotard's flag of 'Revolution' to vie
with its own words. A warning to those who wear
pretty Yang-and-Yin symbols: cling film can tear.
WAVES OF TENSION
Pull the plastic film: waves of tension ruckle
up in neat regions, strict parallels easing
where the strain is. See this metal sheet buckle,
sizzling like cymbals, backwards and forwards as
you impress and repress, fingers squeezing
click into clack into click, whanging its jazz
as you wish. Tap the flint and conchoidal
fracture is rippled where the force burst its way;
though it rent in an instant through the glacial
space, yet these ribs yield a constraint. Clothes display
the same compromise, draping round how you live,
for the creases must show the limit of give.
CHEQUERBOARD FLOOR
On the chequerboard floor of the foyer, I
traced out a bishop's move right to a corner,
then across went another, swift to outvie
what went before. Next it was knight's moves, hopping
three askew, white and black and white; their order,
plain to the eye, had erased the last, stopping
only when in the brain another command
sorted out white diamonds on black, then black on
white, or triangles, letters, or wicker darned
under or over, scrabble-game, octagon,
a barred window, a cage, the moves of a rook.
Could one see it without imposing a look?
HARMONOGRAM
If you watch a harmonogram being made,
you will observe how the pen never repeats
what it's done, for it copies it just a shade
wrongly, though, if it didn't, there wouldn't be
any point to this pendulum's steady beats.
Contours like this show changes that agree
with each other as near as they can, or mark
likenesses seeking change as far as they can.
They divide and converge from light into dark,
opening to freedom, only to close the fan
of themselves, while the pen hurries to enter
farther in, till it's reached the single centre.
HARMONOGRAM AGAIN
It's a pendulum-picture, whorls within whorls,
each cursive script hardly a width of a line
from the next. Though the whole convolution sprawls
yearning through space, it seemed to repeat
quite unchanged all the dictates of the design,
crossing itself. The imperceptible pleat
weaves on, nevertheless, cross-hatching, growing
shell-fish-like, patient in accumulation,
building gyre upon gyre, contours outflowing
as in a coomb on smooth downs, a libration
of the forces contending. Here there's a jerk
in the line. Just a nudge while it was at work.
DAISIES
On the common the daisies' constellations,
each of them tilted radio-telescopes
as they auto-align to the sun. Buttons,
yellow-sewn, hanging loose, pulled one way. Under
shade they cringe without fear. Don't grow on the slopes
(mowers there can't lop the grass and the taller
weeds that drown them), but here, with their leaves hollowed
out of the blades' reach, they thrill to the breeze, free
of emotion, can blush without shame. No ode
need be composed to their 'homely sympathy'
or their 'lowly port'. Know nothing of 'being'.
What they're seen as depends on who is seeing.
CUMULUS CLOUD
We are flying beside a cloud: cumulus —
soufflé confection of sunlight, illumined
within, vapour-meringue, weightless incubus
floating above the dark ocean-bed of Earth,
giant whiteberry, Buddha transfigured, wind-
spun Himalaya of hematite, its girth
mammoth, calling the bourgeois climber to fall,
miming a mystic intensity, glaring
with divine inaccessibility, wall
set against dream to evoke it, and staring
out the eye that would pierce it. Under these palps,
far below, the rain's pouring on darkened alps.