The Wave Hennets: Rhythm
WAVES TAKEN FOR GRANTED
You can take a vibration so for granted —
say, on a ship — that you forget it's there;
for when sailors get sea-legs, they are planted
firm as a rock as they sway madly about;
and that pianist playing hasn't a care
rippling through scales — the only thing that's in doubt
is his reaching crescendo on time; and while
wheels are revolving, the car glides evenly;
while escapements are jerking, hands with safe guile
pass over faces in smoothest secrecy.
Every sight, every sound owed much to this art,
and not least the unnoticed pulse of your heart.
HEART AND LUNGS
Heart and lungs make a music, heard as the blood
thrums. Hear the heart thump on its drum, a native
in a jungle who's sending thud after thud,
coding a humble hope. Can you decode it
like the pulse in your lungs? Is yours its motive
here as you read? Do you tempt it or goad it,
release it or load it, as it pumps for us
and, of course, you? The lungs, like wings, fly through air,
let you sigh, let you speak, at each impetus
bellows spontaneous to your fire, a flare
from a fear or the warmth of a laugh. They strive
to keep up with your heart, and keep you alive.
INVOLUNTARY
Do you notice your breathing? Or your heart?
Certainly not alpha- and delta-waves there
in your brain. What of times — something makes you start
(car skidded; thought it was him/her) — and the throb
is right there, hardly you, but it's where you care,
you or your body! Can try to hold back a sob,
but your diaphragm won't, not when it's a laugh,
save when a fear is in charge. Augustine
couldn't stop an erection. Cramps in the calf,
tightening jaws, buzz like bees. Adrenalin
in its secretive working makes your inside
ebb and flow to some moon as sure as the tide.
SOBBING
Hear that sob? Much more arhythmic than laughing.
Tension is there, but energy can only
drive to waste. There's that fist that is hammering
hard on a door or a brow to no purpose.
In that tribe they tear hair or clothes. The lonely
walk back and forth, not searching but in endless
disappointment with nothing at this end or
that. So the throat throttles itself, not wishing
to breathe in or breathe out. In rictus the jaw
cannot articulate or eat, now kissing
is the prisoner of time. The image is 'break'.
In those throes in the throat you feel the heart ache.
LAUGHING
Hear that laugh? An oscilloscope would show it
pulsing. The diaphragm takes up the surplus
that adrenalin freed for the fear. A fit
no one objects to. It's relief and release,
where anxiety's tyranny has racked us.
Note, though, how strangely we convulse into peace,
all in violence, tears, stitches in the side,
flailing about, all infectious together,
oh so glad to discover what we would hide,
care for our skins, our pride, not bothered whether
we now roll on the ground. What resembles it?
All those times in one's life one dissembles it.
LAUGHING TREE
In this strong wind the tree is laughing, bending
double convulsively. Such gales of laughter.
See the rhythm in helpless release, sending
shivers of anyhow wobble go thrilling
to the ends of the limbs, staggering after
back to the bowing. It's been told such killing
jokes, it's thumping its knees as it dies, flailing
anywhere, wild to become its orgasm,
to escape to itself somewhere else, failing
joyously over and over, each spasm
splitting, holding its sides. With the leaves leaving,
you could see there, instead, a fit of grieving.
LEGS WALKING
All those legs of people walking! Bending
knees just the right degree as they lift and draw
one ahead, while the other swings levering.
Doing them both at the same time in a free
alternation. — How strange! Just like sycamore
seeds on a twizzle; metres based on the spondee;
or a flexible scissors; railway signals
endlessly changing; piano levers in
a long trill; wheel-and-piston links. The muscles
smoothly exchange in unconscious discipline
relaxation and strain in this odd rhythm,
unless mind interferes with some odd symptom.
WALKING
Watch us walking. We balance on rocking stilts
on to our purposes, flipping from the knee
to prevent a gross rolling; hips cancel tilts;
muscles in counterpoint correct and lift on
in one move, to the last, tiniest degree
here in the toe or the shoulder. Marathon
walk from pre-history, childhood, to win total
smoothness, oblivious control in left-right-
left, each marching without matching, with waddle,
stalk, dawdle, half-lope, stride, towards appetite
or desire or from hurt, wherever they will,
each their own way of walking to good or ill.
REPRODUCTIONS
Someone's pharynx is half a millimetre
larger and all his life someone marks her love
by that tone. There's a finger crooks: a neater
'i' is habitual — he can sign his cheque
and be recognized — half a degree above
that favoured angle and where he puts the speck
for his dot would turn him to a forgery.
Copied his father's walk and wasn't aware
that he did — all his life the machinery
deep in his limbs made him unconsciously share
in a beat. He's still certain how to behave,
though the water is changing in every wave.
PALPITATIONS
Watch that tic in the eyelid. A flickering
rapid beyond what is normal. Or a thumb
starts to twitch on its own, muscles rebelling,
even the brain is perhaps the anarchic
one, conspirator lodged in the cranium
secret beside the confident Menshevik.
Or perhaps worse, the heart has been trained too long,
never forgetting the mother's smile, the frown
of the father, betrays an old sense of wrong
now so outmoded to mind, and tumbledown
goes the pulse in a heretic dilation
and contraction, puppet to palpitation.
FOUNTAIN
In a fountain the water fights gravity
right to the top, a soft lollipop-wrestle,
a cold flame against sky, a liquidity
solidly newer each instant, that can slap
upwards drops that are falling, that can nestle
sudden in joltings, rocketing spurts, can snap
into rays like the tracks in a Wilson cloud-
chamber, or drape like candlewax in photo-
flashes dashed to the past in the present. Proud
phallus, a trumpet playing bravissimo
in the parks of the patriarchs. Felt the thump
underground where was running the hidden pump.
RHYTHM IN THE TRAFFIC JAM
From the bridge saw the movement of the traffic:
slow through the jam an opening flow that flowed
backwards, reaching the tail. Kept up a rhythmic
drift like a hump through a long caterpillar,
or a wave through a shaken rope, a blank node
made out of drivers who just waited till a
space appeared, knowing nothing of the rhythm
they were a part of. It's said, if they'd kept to
some low average speed, to a minimum
fifty, then no jam would occur, so this strange queue,
peristaltic, was made out of history.
But to drivers it's just a blank mystery.
RIDING A BICYCLE
Feel a bicycle turn space into motion.
Sleeping policemen wake up to a round leap.
Over cobbles it's like a frozen ocean
just on the melt. Over grit there's a burring
as of tram windows, or, sitting in a jeep
changing its gear. On smooth macadam whirring
like a top. Over hills the rhythm's slower:
effort in ankle, calf and thigh to climax
to the crest, then fly free down to the lower
land that you're bringing up towards you. Your tracks
are what pedals push under you. If you skid
and fall off, it was part of something you did.
RISE AND FALL
On my bike going fast enough over humps,
down into dips, up again. Over cobbles
you would jolt like a pogo pop-fan, the bumps
coming from what was utterly motionless.
At resorts, as the roller-coaster wriggles
screaming articulates in voluptuous
and precipitous whim, the girders below
rigidly held the track that all of them trace.
And a sleeping-policeman makes you go slow,
made of cement though he is. A steeple-chase
is just fences and ditches on a Sunday,
but it's winners and losers on a Monday.
VIEW FROM A WINDOW
As I look from the window, the two children
run to a stop, caught by the sight of a bag
on the waves, as a sundial spinning. Oarsmen
ply wooden, metal, human levers, their boat
spreading chevrons behind. Head to tail, dogs wag
tails and go waltzing. The wind toys with a coat
as if juggling. The cars on the bridge going
opposite ways just as fast. Stick taps in
syncopation with aged feet. Sky growing
dark twenty-four hours before, after earthspin
has dictated. A Persian dome to my eyes,
so the sun sank, ensuring that it would rise.
WRITING
Trace the rhythm of writing. This Indian
script: see the curls briskly depending, curving
like the incoming wave up the sand, written,
though, against time. For the Chinese character,
pen is splayed like a dancer's hand, so swerving,
lifting and crossing that it doubles nature
as it images meaning. The Arabic
flies like a bat as it dots the curlicues
as it loops in the reader. A pogostick
jumps in the English pen, whether poets choose,
politicians or children, unreeling spools.
It can jump its own way while obeying the rules.
PLUCKED STRING
A plucked string is a long transparent ribbon,
marked like a tie or a bar-code with bands. You
see it slowly go twisting, see it widen,
narrow to motionless silence. It could be,
in vibration, no wave, for the eyes subdue
side-to-side motion: it is not that you see
it at all — it's a ranging in time become
solid. No catching it out of time, a pure
and secure actuality — no, its hum
matches the sight in its intent to obscure
all its passionate violence. See it cling,
the organic mind, fast in hope to the 'thing'.
WAVE VERSATILITY
Watch a knitter use rhythm to make the knots
hold in their patterned place. A basket-weaver
slips the reeds side to side so that each allots
strain distributedly. Squeeze hard the damp rag —
it will open to squareness again. Sleeve a
limb and the folds will fall straight, the loose sag
where it's needed. Inside elastic, the waves
making the molecules knit into tight skeins,
into dos-à-dos links, stripping the willow
over and over. Inside diamond, the chains
are but eightsome reels. Don't attempt to engrave
it: the hardness is dance of wave against wave.
LEAF RHYTHM
Every plant grows like music, each leaf the theme
thrust in development from tentative notes.
As the tendrils of melody first unseam
enfolding sepals of rhythm, precision
of a delicate freshness perfectly quotes
other attempts to take infant perfection
without flaw to the sun and the storm. It keeps
time to meet time, challenging change with changing,
pizzicato with thorns, staccato in leaps
strict to the wind's conducting, each estranging
bar inlaying the strain, recording the strife.
On the stave of this river they leave a life.
WOBBLES
On the draining-board sometimes a plate or bowl
got into such a position, if you knocked
it a little it started wobbling, making
regular clackings or tickings. Funny thing
was, it didn't give up: the swing of it rocked
it into being a clock without a spring,
for it went on and on. In time, though, you heard
those steady tick-tockings beginning to go faster.
Was it time going faster? That was absurd,
but you imagined it was.— A disaster
for us all, made us dash to death and decay.
The note rose. Then to silence it whined away.
MORTAL WAVES
When you flapped with the rope, the waves went snaking
on to the end and then vanished, but the rope
stayed the same all the time. When you tried making
flat stones go skipping along for as many
as you could, it was no use trying to hope
they would go on bouncing off to infinity —
all the circles were linking and fading long
after the stone had sunk, no matter how fast
you had spun it. And with a tremendous wong!
up went the music-top. How long would it last
before wobbling and dizzinesss made it roll
and whine downward in quivers, out of control?
SMOKE
Watching smoke making grey mineral veins in
rock that's transparent and still molten; they lean
like elastic young saplings, are drawn out thin,
stretching like glue, twisting in delirium.
From the chimney up there the white smoke has been
brushed into whorls like an uncanny totem
come to life. It is Jupiter's equator:
eddies of centuries, continents across.
On the news an oil fire: as from a crater
turbans of inrolling flame, flashing, emboss
the mad vortex like kidney-iron. Minimum
or maximum, smoke shows the hidden rhythm.
RHYTHMS OF AIR
All the clouds show the rhythms of air, their shapes,
spacious or tenuous, so plain to your eyes,
trace invisible beats. Common vapour drapes
dynamic vortices none can perceive.
Do admire all the majesty of sunrise,
curse crimes of thunderclouds, but it's make-believe:
those palatial unveilings of ecstasy,
crimson with joy, those far-off isles of the blest,
are the work of the wind's ideology;
anvil clouds, hammering storms out of the west,
bringing riot, are a part of that halcyon
hocus-pocus, the work of that self-same sun.
RECURRENCE
See how rhythms recur. Your own watch ticking
(these days perhaps it's flicking) there on your wrist
where a pulse is. And eyelids wipe and breathing
idles as engines trick through intricacies
once again, once again. The wind is a twist
going back to where it started. Eddies
in a stream that is flowing back to where
rainfall began, blood setting out from the heart
to return like hands on a clock, a prayer
joining Amen to Ave, planets that part
for a later occlusion — Is it not strange
to tie future to past, and sameness to change?
IN AND OUT OF PHASE
There's a hooter each day. You see the steam plume
rise before hearing the noise — one wave's faster
than another. And I'm walking, although the bloom
over my head on the chestnut is only
just beginning its petalling. A jogger
passes me each day, his expression clumsy
with the jolting, but not as rapidly
as those familiar cars with their drivers
calmly deaf behind glass, whom the sunlight has
ordered in line once again. And all those singers
in the trees! — the old thrush at his old station,
but he's singing another variation.
WITHIN THE RHYTHMS
Say the sea breathes or lungs are tidal. A heart
drums while a stretched skin pulses. As a brain rings
with a memory, bells, beaten with tongues, start
now to remember the time. At the Stations
of the Cross every priest measures his pausings
no more exactly than the dark durations
in the cycles of growth: the tree in winter
suffers a stilling of sap. Within one year
what is born, grows up, tires, dies, is a flower:
after threescore and ten a blossom falls sere
to a cold wind not blown from the north. Glancing
among electrons you might find there a dancing.
APRIL GALE IN THE ORCHARD
No — Yes — some apple branches are nodding, none
though quite in time with each other, and others
shake their heads, different ways. In this wind not one
settles to satisfaction, and their leaves raise
hands in horror, or, clapping like flatterers,
follow the sway of the moment. Blossom sprays
are now scattering propaganda, somewhat
tarnished already where it swims with the stream;
other petals are tossed to the winds by lot,
all playing fast and loose. Standard apples deem
they are steady in winds, but, if it blows twice
as hard soon, they'll know this isn't paradise.