The Wave Hennets: Round and about
SUNDAY BELLS
Hear the bells toppling down the scale, never
up. They're a gong stomping downstairs. Metal clings
to its ring, blurring vision, inner pressure
holding vibrations like memory, forcing
air in yards of the city's spaces to swings
sudden throughout its summer breeze that's moving
to a planet's gyrations. As persistent
children keep climbing to the top of the slide
for another go down, the bells' blank, plangent
blows search and lurch for a beat, as if they tried
to recover an endlessly lost pleasure
to be found in a perfectly sure measure.
SPACE IN THE LAW
Flashing on, flashing off, the Panda crossing's
amber lights let both the pedestrian and
any motorist know there's a space where things
haven't been fixed, a lawful hole in the law.
Yes, the peeping has stopped, but we understand
here is a space and a time for give-and-take.
Who's to give, who's to take is up to the folk
who have arrived at that point in space and time
to match want against want. For these two, a joke,
over-politely deferring, pantomime
bowings: These two, fists shake automatically,
while the lights flash alternately, neutrally.
ALTERNATING BEACONS
Down the road at the zebra-crossing, the two
beacons are flashing. Now they are both in phase:
they are on, they are off, they are on, as true
lovers' hearts beating, or loyal troops marching,
or devout laymen raising voices of praise.
Time is not mastered, though. A slight faltering
now is puzzling the eye. Could it be that one
premature, coming too soon, incandescent
before orders to fire, hosannas begun
while it was still Lent? Or is his protestant
delay meant? her intended a jilt? Before
very long you can see they'll be both at war.
PNEUMATIC DRILL
A pneumatic drill's sound is toothed like a cog,
cubically studded into the ear, giant
zip that jars in the head, each link a banged jog
hard to one's sound-space, thumping all other sounds
into tinny and trivial, vehement
violent beating in impossible bounds
of a second, a fist never exhausted,
jingled with metal randomly tossed, snappings
from the cracking macadam, that is crannied,
split and fragmented volcanically, slappings
from all echoing flats of wall. Wakes dream-fears —
for how can he not wear something on his ears?
THE HIGHWAY ENGINEER'S SIGNS ON THE PAVEMENT
Been along with his spray-can, the engineer,
spraying the spots on the pavement that he thinks
need repair: there's a ring round that hole; a smear
highlighting cracks in a stone; a dayglo blot,
orange-vivid as Hindu powder, on chinks
spreading like deltas in the kerb. These are not
signs and signals for us. His workmen, later,
will be along to put right what he's chosen.
They'll do these and no others. If a crater
opened unmarked, they'd have to leave it broken —
Well, they would, wouldn't they? He'd give them a talk!
But we take them as warning where not to walk.
TAKING PRECAUTIONS
As you click on the latest Which-tested and
AA-approved 'Minder' on your driving-wheel,
ask who minded a child some time beforehand.
That automatic light on your garage-wall
couldn't switch on, served rather to conceal
just when the class got to forty. When you call
the league-table results, don't ask who's winning
down at the bottom at shoplifting. Infra-
red detects any warmth except the burning
down of the school ten years ago. Their idea
is to join a Neighbourhood Watch — they should
remember they didn't watch their neighbourhood.
ESCALATOR
At the top of the escalator you must
make yourself move if you don't want to trip up.
You were moving already — wasn't your thrust,
though the floor wouldn't know. Hardly knew that you
were in motion. Unless you plan to skip up,
all you've to do is stand quite still in the queue
with your hand on the belt. Wouldn't know that it's
moving at all, were it not that the belt creeps
as you rise, and your hand jerks in tiny fits
since it's got no idea that the belt sweeps
just a little away from you all the time.
It is what you've to put up with for the climb.
THE LASER AT SAINSBURY'S
Saw the laser wink at me in Sainsbury's,
star in a shop, pink as a burning Bengal light,
and as piercing as acupuncture. Rubies
tricked into rhythm to register bar-codes
of spaghetti and yoghurt that appetite
meets with what's meet, and the trolleys' loads
with the money. A wave that is pure sparkles
sharp with assurance among the slow-shuffling
queues, the bland metal bars, the plastic panels
guiding the customer. Stared at its twinkling
tiny beacon, Antares-intensities.
Couldn't use it to steer by in Sainsbury's.
MOTORWAY PERSPECTIVE
Make the motorway widen as you're driving.
Not you that's moving, but this perspective V
upside-down that is spreading, slow outstriving,
growing in size, from a centre that's aligned
to your eyes, and that slides ever more quickly
off to the left and the right. Cat's-eyes, combined
in the distance, now cut adrift, spacing out
further and further. White lines zip like freight-trains
under bridges; slip-roads to the roundabout
zoom up or zoom down and away, aeroplanes
peeling off from formation. Youths, transfixed, stand
in arcades before screens where the roads expand.
THE FAIR
There's a fair by the river. Couples that are
whirled round in whirling make a Ptolemaic
epicycle best matched by these waves. A car
swings in an arc, dipping and lifting in tune
with the music and water, an ecliptic
tracing the shrieks in the air. A pink cocoon
is now spun on a stick for sweetness. The Big
Wheel repeats climax and downfall. The glitter
is worth nothing at all. In a whirligig,
pennies settle to loss. Even litter
does an entrechat. Bulbs taking and giving,
as if passing the light from dead to living.
FAIRGROUND ATOMICS
On the merry-go-round the rocking-horses
pattern electrons in their orbits, music
of the infinitesimal spheres. Courses
taken by bumper-cars are the molecules
of a gas. In the gambling-booths hear the click,
loaded with hope, of God's dice following rules
out of chaos. Wurlitzers score their spirals
spiralling DNA's through time. The Big Wheel
can be Fortune's: the king at the top tumbles,
squealing new goddesses rise in a surreal
shambling image of wave. There, gravitation
is denied in centrifugal levitation.
TWO SORTS OF GRAFFITI
On the bridge are graffiti. Not the swollen code,
letters ballooning with macho arrogance,
in the comic-strip slapdash zigzagging mode
drawn on the other bridge, where a palimpsest
there records the historical coexistence
over the years of emblems proving the best
was the tops was the best in starry scarlet
or hissed in purple, hieroglyphic in black;
all those monograms mark that cement tablet
swaggering-bright with the faith that they'll be back.
No, on this bridge it's not done by underlings —
macho pride records shields of Caius, Selwyn, King's.
LOADS O' METAPHOR
On the willows in winter is amber hair
(valuable stone — see the Burlington Arcade).
Poplars upside-down, tassels rocking in air
(tassels are often gilt). The dark cypresses
infold drapery round them to persuade
us of their aristocratic addresses
(like the don in the Sandeman port advert).
Birches have horse-white bark (it's the chivalric
beast — this girl in the riding-hat is expert
doubtless, her profile is aristocratic).
There a vandal has snapped a new-planted tree,
wounded wood like Mohican hair's anomie.
FROM THE UNDERGROUND TRAIN
Through the panes of the underground train, serpent
cable that sagged from supports, and copper wire
held on prongs, one a fat lolling existent,
rolls of hard clay heavy with long-settled dust,
and the other a twin autumn-gleaming lyre,
both in still life. Now the train moves to the thrust
of the volts in such cable and wire. The panes
picture obsession and gleeful violence:
of limbs leaping and thumping frantic refrains
blurred into vertigo, nervous pursuance
of a dithering parallel of digits
paroxysmally plucking in mad fidgets.
THE ROCKETS
How the rockets aspire! Then they're galaxy-
globes cracking fire against the night, concave
and convex at the same time, hanging fantasy
comets and meteors in gilded blues, reds, greens
on the spokes of a spherical wheel that flex
downward like willow-boughs. These are our ‘patines
of bright gold’ now the stars can't be seen, and we
‘Ooh!’ and ‘Aah!’ to the pyrotechnical
substitution. They're bright sempiternally
now, silver dandelion-clocks that prickle
out soon as blown, so quick we can't shift our gaze,
and we see smoke-ghosts the winds at once erase.
AUTUMN LEAVES: TWO STATES
They are clenched like arthritic hands, bowed like old
shoulders, as dry as burnt paper, shrunken sails
as of junks, or stiff bats' wings, paper scraps rolled
tight by a nervous finger and thumb and now
half uncoiled, or dead feathers, ragged fantails
cracked in the quill. But wind snaps them from the bough
and a short life returns: a brisk spiralling,
pert ballerina, flies airily out of view;
order-papers or hats flap hurrahs; tumbling
clowns, over, under themselves; there in the blue
acrobats, trapeze-artists swoop in delight,
show us what can be done with life at its height.
DEAD LEAVES IN THE WIND
See the dead leaves in wild spirals, cobra
swayings and dizzying spins round nothing but
themselves, chasing to centres in a mania,
faster and faster at getting there first, where
there is only the sucking wind. Ash, chestnut,
oak, indefinable scraps panic in air
in a corkscrew of scuffle and downfall, caught
back in obsession to death, for they now sink
into rustling heaps placed as if by forethought
just where the walls and fences made the wind shrink
from its onward career. What says their defeat? —
that their wildness obeyed the bend of the street.
MIST
Like an airship at rest the mist stills in air.
Sharp-edged above, softer below, a cuttle-fish
shell, it stains the air gray so the trees share
space with it. Billiard-ball cyclist's helmet drifts
without body beneath. On the road the cars swish
through, but it heals its being. Here it has clear rifts
like crevasses and turns snow-smoothed glacier;
there it's so level, the houses beyond lie
out of reach on the far side of a river.
Strangeness stirs memory to command the eye
to see what will seduce it: mist will unfurl
to desiring the pearl whiteness of a girl.
AUTOMATIC WALKWAY
At Heathrow, on the automatic walkway,
walking along, you're farther on than you think.
If you look at the tread only, you would say
all is as normal, but there's a dizzying
and upsetting surprise — this Terminal Link
shifts the wall faster that it ought, carrying
you to goals you don't know. Some people walked on
faster still. Passing those on the other side —
they have nine-league boots — walking slow they have gone
long before you, swept on yourself, could decide
who it was. You've to watch at the end: I found
you'd to match how you step to the tricky ground.
VIEW FROM THE TRAIN
When you watch from the train, it's the lines that move,
hurrying nervously through selves. Each sleeper
is awake, shuffling identities that prove
dealing was cheating, what is caught snatched away.
At a curve see the curve as still, the clinker
smoothed into sand. At a junction, points sashay,
have exchanged all their aims to sleek persuasion,
slaves to a lever elsewhere. One sun reflects
in one dazzle from rails' unmoving motion,
racing through stillness. See how sight intersects
with both ends of the spectrum: how it would save
the pure Thing, while betrayed by pulsings of wave.
ROLLER-BLADING IN NEW YORK
Here on roller-blades racing detachedly,
smoothly remote in another time from cars
and pedestrians, skaters trace the city
streets, leaning out of direction in order
to direct in a swaying sweep down couloirs
opened by chance, a finesse with disorder,
at its keenest just now at the lights where a
black youth flirts matador-play with hesitant
drivers, checking his pirouettes to scare a
law-abider to brake. They are confident
angels, flying sublime, eternal, while we
keep our humdrum pace, safe from catastrophe.
NIAGARA FALLS
As it's drawn to the falls, it's drawn to the falls,
muscular glass knowing its own shredding before
it has shredded in tons all the tons it trawls
headlong in air, to white leaps leaping to spray
either catching the eye down, seeing it soar
gently apart into chaos, a heyday
of refuelled explosions, or dashing through
vision like twitching threads of silk asbestos,
while the mist is ballooning across tissue
tinted in nowhere of a rainbow. A floss
is upwelling below, fading anarchy,
an achievement of peace, soothed satiety.
BETTING-MACHINE
There's a betting-machine in this plastic café,
jigging frenetic lights. A pyramid mounts
up in vertical bands in flashing display;
reds replace blues, twitching to horizontal —
Oh what fun in the Phi Effect! What quick founts
dashing with brilliance like silver! Colossal
sums go summing in orange where the arrows
point to the slot, and two wobbling eyes ogle
with the promise of loads and pots, the zero
kept to the end of the figure. An Opal
fruit is winking in welcome. Come, have a splash!
All this light it needs paying for, with your cash.
BACARDI ADVERTISEMENT
The Bacardi advertisement showed us on
screen the long curve of a lush tropical beach
in the sunshine. A voice, as part of the con,
said, in a cockney-chum tone, "This is Peckham
of a Saturday night." he was out to teach
us the delights of escape in drinking rum.
Said a parrot became "Aunt Mabel's budgie."
Said the paid model in the revealing dress
was "Aunt Beryl." The Barbados drinks party
held in "The Dog and Duck." My deviousness
was much greater than his: I saw on my own —
forced my eyes to note counter, twig and stone.
'USE METAMORPHOSIS!
If you advertise, use Metamorphosis!
Context's the thing! That it's a Gumm's toothpaste tube
anyone can see -- let it sing 'Halitosis
banished forever!' with mouth and dancing legs.
By the car put a girl as a sugar-cube --
curves become curves. Put happy faces on your eggs,
let your milk-bottles waddle, let your 'Lion' bar
break like a roaring jaw (don't forget the roar
on the soundtrack!), and, abracadabra!,
fixed in their memories what they can't ignore.
Let a pun come upon them -- then let them choose,
but don't give them a chance to add their own clues.
SHOPS AFTER CHRISTMAS
They are selling the chocolate money cheap.
Sales after Christmas. Mince-pies past their sell-by
date. The seconds. The pullovers in a heap,
all of a fashion of four months past. Bargains
at a fifty per cent reduction to buy
at the original price. The mannequins
bare, improbably jointed, still with a stare
challenging envy. The crowds all looking in,
over, under and at, strictly anywhere
but at each other. Escalators in twin
opposition, denying the other's aim,
yet their passengers meekly glide all the same.
PHILISTINES
No, they didn't like poetry, but they went
off to a rave called 'Fantazia'. No, they
couldn't stand all this modern art, but they spent
more when the advert copied Magritte. Hated
all this nonsense put out as music today,
yet behind Robokiller, Oscar-rated
background music so thrilled them they became it.
Sculpture, they say, ruins the park, but they bought
hi-fi loudspeakers, each a chromium kit
grilled like Darth Vader's helmet. And what they thought
was the best was the plaster shire stallion,
the green nude who'd been wrung, and a galleon.
PUBLIC ART
There were open-air sculptures on the river
bridge, welded constructs of rusty iron — spinal
bolted reptile, half-jaw with wrenched incisor,
skeleton barrel, rubbish-crunched motor-car —
where graffiti announced 'PRIVATE URINAL',
'EGO MALFUNCTION', and 'THE NORM IS BIZARRE'.
Saw the people walk round them, and the dog pause,
children with questions pulled away, the wino
seated, screwing and unscrewing a flask. Claws,
teeth, bones and deformation, all undergo
the ignoring of busy life. It was found,
the next day, two or three of them had been drowned.
TOWERS IN LJUBLJANA
All the churches in Ljubljana assert
towers octagonal, each capped with baroque
chessman bishops and kings. Starting with a skirt
(umbrella, harebell), with a poppy-seed case
or a turban on top, they rise to a cock,
cross, spike or trident, like a cosmonaut's space-
capsule, enwrapped in lead. Here, though, is one close,
piped like an armchair seat-cover, lead moulded
like a parcel and lapped tightly over gross
bulges and cornices, snipped, clipped and folded
to the mould, and it's striped with ghost-rain and wipe
of rust. Real rain's delivered to the drainpipe.