The Wave Hennets: Scientific
LIGHT ALL OVER THE SPACE
All the light of a laser is 'coherent',
marching in ranks all in time. Ordinary
light goes higgledy-piggledy, the ambient
air full of criss-crossing rays, so wherever
you may move or just glance in arbitrary
fashion, a fan of light awaits you, never
failing, focused with ease. But this means that an
infinite criss-crossing mass of waves flows through
itself, pure labyrinthine Borges pattern,
ever renewed up and down, back and forth, to
and fro. Light's rushing at you from everywhere
as you stand under sky's wide blue sunlit air.
LIGHT-WHEEL
There are four little squares, black on one side and
silver the other, inside a transparent
globe, a vacuum. The sunlight is what has fanned
them into motion. Radiation from the black
is enough of a push to turn a silent
dance of geometries, a fluttering track
of their shadows on concave glass, a flicker
under the convex reflections of the windows.
When a minute sun shines in them, then quicker
whirls the quadrille. Each of the followers knows
she's a leader, who traces what she has traced.
Now in twilight, it's calm, to which they have raced.
BLEACHED PHOTOGRAPH
On the windowsill, photographs, bleached by the sun.
Here are the Cambridge Backs: a punt, and a lone
figure, strawboated, lost to oblivion,
in a world of grey-greens. All trees are larches
turned deciduous willow. The sky is bone,
and the river. The red punts under the arches
of the bridge are empurpled, its balustrade
a parade of toy soldiers in lichen green.
Someone leans elbows on the parapet, stayed
in the glaucous murk always — What has he seen? —
his binoculars focused on whoever
is here now and is looking back forever.
THE ON-OFF CELLS IN THE RETINA
In the eye there are 'on-off' cells that detect
sharp alterations of light, evolved to warn
of the dangerous predator, to select
those who were cautious. So there's the AA
lamp in the top of the van because we are born
thus, and we turn to the sparrows, and we play
better tennis, and fit the trafficators,
move or refrain from moving in our converse,
seeking love or avoiding it; to traitors
waiting in ambush, or, in verse,
line-ends striking attention. There is no doubt
we don't notice the light until it goes out.
DEW
There's celestial iridescence in dew.
Prismatic stars, where plain grass can but choose
its reflections. To hold one keen point of blue
taxes the eye — it is green, copper, or gone
if you move but a fraction. You can but lose
when you are finding. Down there a ruby shone
like a brighter Antares burning through Earth
right from the other side — no astronomer
would be able to find it again. The birth
here of this topaz Arcturus no summer
can prolong. It's just photons scattered from dew.
And a human brain staining wavelengths with hue.
POLARIZED LIGHT
Through the Polaroid lens tensions show up in
perspex in rainbow ripples, flitting, as strain
flits unseen, like the Northern Lights, uncertain
blushing and wincing, quick electricity
that will blanch what was reddening, that will stain
transparent plainness with pink perplexity
at the speed of a spark, nervily leaping
out of a royal blue's assurance into
pale and tremulous yellow, from a fading
flame to a glowing green, exchanging its hue
as it gives more and more in strenuous play —
till it snaps right across, and it's back to gray.
A FLUORESCENT LIGHT
When you look at a fluorescent light, it
gazes so blandly back you wouldn't suspect
what it does when you're not looking. See it flit
busily in and out all the time, by just
quickly glancing aside. You're sure to detect
tremor and doubt. It seems that some darkness must
hide itself in the light, that can only be
caught by obliquity. Some faint stars there are
that will vanish at once if you try to see
where they are shining, but will play the bizarre
trick of coming to being to sideways looks.
'Circumvent commonsense' say the wisest books.
GRAPH-PAPER
On the graph every place that you choose can be
given its numbers. No matter where the line
tries to wriggle, they've named it. Even in 3-
D or in four dimensions the little squares,
tiny cubes marked in seconds, safely assign
action to law. All your doodling unawares
could be put into formulae. Digital
pictures showed people all zig-zag, but making
the squares small enough turns everything normal.
Counting's what counts. You could only be faking
if you thought you could draw and not be correct
and go charging around without being checked.
THE MANDELBROT FRACTAL
Yes, the Mandelbrot fractal's an artichoke,
sprouting its clones. It unfurls fern fronds, Persian-
carpet freaked, or Byzantine croziers, joke-
frilled with more croziers. Its squat black spheres show
little taste for decoration. A canyon
opens where only a crevice shows, a spike
turns to peak, and then peak is enlarged into
octopus-tentacled galaxy. You find
what you found. All those encrustations of gems,
if you inspect them, are only what you mined
some screens back. Be alert to confirm your fears:
at the end you are back with the squat black spheres.
PICTURES OF CIRCLES
In the maths room were pictures of 'Circles in
Nature': the ends of sawn logs, piles of melons,
rings round bubbles in mud, a top in a spin,
salmon fry, peacock-butterfly's black wing-eye,
golden marigolds, suns — pleasing the patterns,
bright-hued the posters that aimed to beautify
utilitarian hut, to make poetic
plain mathematics' detachment, seducing
any pupil unwary. This cosmetic
works in these lines. Readers must try reducing
every line to eleven neat syllables,
while delighting in distracting vocables.
PAINTING BY NUMBERS
In the maths room were pictures the first year had
done. They'd to add up two numbers. The answer
told them which colour filled the space. To add
guaranteed blue and green and brown for the sky
and the field and the rabbit. You went faster
if you were good at maths, but an artist's eye
was no use, slowed you down if you tried to shade
patches some way to suit the look of the thing.
The result, still, was strange, for with all displayed,
though all showed rabbits looking cuddly in spring,
one sheet sang out its tunes, a true musician,
though each one had completed the addition.
ENGINES AT THE CAMBRIDGE INDUSTRIAL MUSEUM
Yes, the pistons were phallic, though they didn't
piss, but they were oiled as with such smooth entrance
and withdrawal and entrance, such confluent
compatibility, they drove knuckled bars,
servile cams and supreme valves in compliance
each with the other. There were no jolts or jars
as momentum built up in the steadying
wheel, just a menacing breeze as joints vanished
in a blur, the authority of driving
pulses directed by law. All went as wished
in ecstatic gyrations at level pace,
each repeating, repeating its destined trace.
HEAT WAVES
Like the striae in hot acid the warm air
over a road in summer dithers, roping
through the hues of the hedges. I see it tear,
twist into shreds the horizon, and then heal
or anneal it to focus, telescoping
houses to steeples, then twinkling them piecemeal
among fields that are fusing to quicksilver
flames. Here each nucleus, every boundary
is in chronic impermanence. Midsummer
ecstasy, restless as a voluptuary,
ever flinching from snatchings, and ever fleet
to erase his frustration, is slave to heat.
SYNAESTHETIC SOUND-TRACK
On the sound-track alongside of the pictures
words would show shapes. If he said "Crag", a sudden
breaking-up of the lines and all those jiggers
spread out on each side reminded one of a crag.
If she said "Lullaby", all the chameleon
track had soft curves, all the edges seemed to sag
to the lilt of the song. These changes in time
copied those changes in space. We hear sounds,
calling one 'sharp' and one 'soft'. It’s a kind of chime
linking time-space and sense right across the bounds
that are limiting us. Nothing easier
for the naive response. Synaesthesia.
SOUND-WAVES ARE SPHERICAL
All the sound-waves really are swelling balloons,
thousands and thousands, all growing outwards, each
fitting inside the one before; whether tunes,
words, or explosions, they're invisible spheres,
silent mushrooming domes, all trying to reach
out to the universe, ignoring the ears
they rush by as they grow, thrilling, vibrating
all that they brim through an instant — then they've swept
their existence on through another being,
living in borrowed bodies, for nothing's kept
once it's danced with their beat -—just a brief delay,
a faint shaking and sobbing that dies away.
RESONANCE
At the resonant frequency, suspension
bridges can break. That one in America
that the wind began swinging, where the tension,
hidden in strut and in hawser, turned a road
to a cradle, to a convulsing vertebra,
dandled self-strung on a gallows, with its load
tossed a light as a rattle, till cemented
joists, welded girders ripped in passion apart,
flinging cables to nowhere, in demented
spasms of agonized Dionysiac art
that now shook it to ruin. Better to bear
Apollonian life than to dance in air.
A BUS'S RESONANT FREQUENCY
As we're jiggled about to the resonant
frequency even the latest buses can't
quite keep dampened, remember it's aberrant
rhythm, alien to interconnections
of valve, cylinder, piston, cog. All the chant,
carefully syllabled to the corrections
made down the years, follows the ceremony
perfect machines all must repeat and repeat,
one crank bowing while cams in antiphony
lift up the lever, but this resonant beat
is the body's own pulse, that cannot but churn
up inside till it shakes the engine in turn.
VELOCITIES
An electron's a wave that goes much too quickly,
instant in atoms, yet I see this water;
and the Moon is so patient pulling the sea,
taking six hours to get the tide down the shore
that I can't tell it's moving, yet earlier
waves had been breaking down there, ones that I saw,
ones that I see again, thanks to memory's
prompt ignoring of hours, magic prediction,
taking no time, writing what was history's
drowned inscriptions of sand by instant fiction
on tomorrow's blank page — a muse's talent,
though a heart's required, throbbing in the present.
ECHOES
Though you're hardly aware of it, sounds tell you
what is around them. Hear in that faint echo
all the space of the chasm: your loud halloo,
lost to the human, is spoken by distance,
by the obdurate rocks. In a studio
hear the walls' fibrous hollows in the absence
of reflection; a word in a marble hall
brings you the smoothness of cool pillar and dome;
in the Underground, wheels run along the wall,
slamming it back at you; and notice at home
how a room speaks its special self with your voice.
What you're saying is not entirely your choice.
CRYSTALS
We know crystals are waves. Here in this gypsum,
crisp trapezoid, layers of rainbow hollow
deeper down like a stage-set, keening rhythm
year after year in silence. A sea-urchin
is this fragmented quartz; each crystal-gazebo
jammed in a motionless explosion, each twin
facet proof of molecular dance beyond
invisibility; expressionist towers
that are toppling forever. An agate frond,
inlocked with adamant, frames in ornate bowers
what is waving as fast as light. No escape
from seeing what is in time as if it's shape.
PAPERWEIGHT
In a globe of clear plastic a dandelion-
clock telling time by millennia. Designed
to disperse, but now gemmed never to fly on
lightest of airs anywhere. Parachute-seeds
lie entombed in a smooth sphere, never to find
lodging in soil or warmth or water. No weeds
will star lawn or pierce path from these. A rocket-
burst of grey ghost-sparks, each with a tiny bare pate,
down the centuries rigid. With this clock, it
would be a possible dream to count the late
and last summer of all, with time in fetters.
Now, a paperweight, holding down some letters.
STATIC
After grinding the coffee, the coffee-grains
strangely won't stay where they're put. It's the static
electricity. Try to spoon them out, they
fly like insects, at odds with plain gravity.
Find they fluff the expected thing, erratic
as if living, display their agility
in frustrating your aim, or worse, not aware
of it, puckishly caught in a mischievous
leapfrog they cannot give up. See dust and hair
jump acrobatic to a comb, luminous
crackles catch at your vest and set you poking.
The warm cat gives a shock just when you're stroking.
CHLADNI'S RINGS
There is dust on the mudguard, on the flat part,
fuzzing in rings to vibration — Chladni's Rings.
It is helplessly marshalled in a found art,
mimicking woodgrain or tiger-stripes, moiré
overlappings of fences, fluttering wings,
widening circles of ripples in sashay
to the right, to the left, dervishes possessed
by a tyrannical rhythm, regiments
in advance on the field, marching in line abreast,
all automatically brave, no dissidence
in this dust. As to ideological
music, marching on, mindlessly dutiful.
SPRINGS
You should like springs. They take a tension with such
deft distribution, and are ready to lift
for themselves when the pressure eases. A touch
sends any strain in a sharing wave along
through the spirals, allowing each twist to shift
out of constriction to space. It's why they are strong,
why they are able to buffer the headlong train,
why you can stay in a car over rough ground,
how, like the words in a poem, they can refrain
from a mean holding down of sense, and can bound
to a fresh and a free interpretation
while they link you to lawful affirmation.
THE SPECTRUM OF ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES
Long-wave radio — the size of a football pitch.
Gamma-rays — 12 noughts after the decimal
point. Between, all the rest. You turn on the switch,
sound first, then vision, coded upon the backs
of a metre. The infinitesimal
shaking of X-rays penetrates, tracing tracks
on a film. Bees and locusts can see ultra-
violet, and snakes, infra-red. At point-six-nought of a metre
cortex can cope, mix shorter and longer lights,
make a space into time, and time into glow,
into rainbows and opals, midnight and snow.
FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM
In the Science Museum they have that great
pendulum, several storeys high. The bob
is released in the morning, swings at a rate
slower than walking, too slow to seem a swing
with such patience. It could hardly be called 'throb',
'pulse' or 'vibration', so untroubled a thing,
for it passes that way with such settled will
that you can hardly believe it's the same one
passing this way. Nor is it a treadmill.
Rhythms so stable seem not to run
as necessity rules — for see later that day:
it is swinging according to its own sway.
SETTING THE TIME-BASE CONTROL ON THE OSCILLOSCOPE
An oscilloscope time-base control allows
careful adjusters to make the wave stand still.
With the knob in the wrong place, thousands of nows
whisk left and right, whizzing green fences fooling
with the glimpses of limitless freedom till
vision's bewildered; or they are skeins weaving
on a loom made of light, knitting all their
lost possibilities away out of sight
so you never unravel them, anywhere
save on this living screen, rhythms leaping bright
to electrical beat — so adjust the knob
till you have the wave captured, without a throb.
AUDIO-FREQUENCIES ON AN OSCILLOSCOPE SCREEN
An oscilloscope screen. The time-base trembled,
jolting to every disturbance. Just a cough
made a spike. The green twisting threads resembled
water-reflections under bridges, the line
where the surface meets glass in a see-saw trough,
cross-section waves running both ways. Here the sign
of a sine in the circuits, in microphone
shaking to pharynx. Hold up the tuning-fork
and the curve of the sine as pure as the tone:
try your own voice and Himalayas were talk,
and a song became Dracula-teeth. I tried
very hard to sing pure, but blips multiplied.
WAVES ON AN OSCILLOSCOPE SCREEN
See a wave standing still on oscilloscope
screen, and you know it's a track for millions
of electrical pulses, an envelope
plainly prosaic concealing high-voltage
hieroglyphs, impulsive compositions
scored for repeats, a brilliant average —
as one meaning for everyone's separate
saying the same word or reading the same verse;
but it isn't so steady, this passionate
union of opposites. What magnets coerce
coincides no more purely than what we mean.
See the pangs on the rack of this restless screen.
WHEELS
Wheels were fun. Just a coin you could bowl along,
watch it go pure-somersaulting on its way
till it coiled in a settling whir, like a gong
in its fading. Toy cars could make your hand run
without let over curves, libidinous play.
Then with cogs, gritting teeth, the handle you spun
at this point turned the great big wheel over there,
spokes pointing upward and downward because you
were demanding it. Cams and cranks declare
bias, designed to deflect just in order to
keep the real end in view. Sometimes wheels go slow,
start to judder and falter, then just won't go.
RADAR-SCREEN
Like the hand of a clock the radar's time-base
turns and the screen is swept as with a fading map,
a torn banner, spiralling out a moon-face,
ghost-green, revived by the burning line as fire
over print, that is land blank as an icecap,
sea left as black. The time-base performs its gyre
to the aerial's prying echoes, branding
each into place. Out of rhythm an image
only humans can read, their understanding
making of electron impact a message
wrought from vacancy, truth learned from a gleaning
from a universe that waves without meaning.
THE BAROMETER
The barometer's mercury registered
760 millibars, changing already
but we couldn't see, because all that mattered
really to weathermen was a rough reading.
See that liquid as solid steel; no eddy
ever disturbs that rod. All we were needing
was approximate certainty, but we took
shifting as sure. Up above, though, high across
crowded continents, planetary floss
will bring hurricane floods in random fashion.
So the mercury's pulsing to a passion.
SOUND IN THE GROUND
Put your ear to the ground. Not all vibrations
bugle their presence. Cavalry far away
may now be thudding under you. Foundations
tremble before anyone imagines it
to that antipodean earthquake. They say
trains are betrayed by lines. Clever the rabbit
who can thump to his friends out of sight, just as
poets in metre, or prisoners in cells
along water-pipes. Many a glad child has
whispered through string from tin to tin. Decibels
need not always be on the threshold of pain.
To the deaf a drum strums a heavenly strain.
GEOLOGICAL WAVES
There are old waves in landscapes, where the strata
ruckled to pressure, folded, overfolded,
in relief from a strain. Even the magma
spreads out its rows under the ocean, hardens
into crystalline flows. The earth is moulded,
plate against plate. Under houses and gardens,
under motorways, cornfields, factories, lie
syncline and anticline, mute memorial
of the shrinkage where firm rock had to comply.
Driving your car up and down that upheaval
you record it yourself. There's even a clue
as you stand at your door, admiring the view.
SEISMOLOGY
I have friends who are geophysicists. Know
all about earthquakes, even make artificial
ones, exploding a charge. Through the earth there flow
seismic shocks; pressure-waves ring like cymbals
through the rocks and the magma, great spherical
upside-down domes ('for the earth hath bubbles,
as the water has'), distorting as they grow,
bearing the marks upon them of their travels,
for refracted, attenuated, by so
long an experience, they ring like symbols
to the faithful recorder. The trauma's drum
beats of all that the patient has now become.
TURNING EARTH
The earth turns and the shadow retreats here and
spreads there, regaining, yielding. Vast planes of light
of no colour are inwardly flashed to grand
reds and vermilions and pinks in a million
waking cortices, fading to 'black' 'night'
where no external blackness or night even
exists, there on the 'other side; where no side
is, unless known. Auroras wince blue static
that's no more than a rhythm we've magnified
up into wonder; here below, chromatic
their glow, only because we are here to see.
Without us all the glory would cease to be.
THE TIDE OF EARTH
They've discovered a tide in the earth. Only
just a few millimetres, but soil and rock
sedimented or fused, give testimony,
heaving in strain, of a rhythm they keep.
Where the herds of the water, obedient, flock
flowing in valleys, jostling at spring or neap
to the moon's secret spur, tossing, shouldering,
helplessly driven even to a stampede
at a narrows, the flesh of earth, smouldering
miles under old pressures, cannot but take heed
of the same and the same, must perforce contend
with returning waves bending what cannot bend.
STRATA
Took a knife to the swiss-roll, cut it sideways.
That made the spirals elliptical. Through this
agate pebble, cylindrical tubes turn maze,
showing oblique roundels here, woodgrain feather
there. This plywood slot, miniature abyss
matching the Grand Canyon. Pressured together,
such a laminate's stronger — and see pattern
puzzling itself to whatever shape the plane
or the spokeshave have left. Down in the cavern
thread through the strata, follow the ore through the vein,
mine the gems that you'll find there so eagerly,
till you come to the fault, the anomaly.
DIGITAL TIMEKEEPING
This chronometer showed tenths of a second,
green on a digital screen, so fast the eye
was deceived: a contortionist that beckoned,
writhed, somersaulted and turned back to front, went
through his act in a mad race to multiply
self into time against time. Seconds spent
themselves right through a second with this same dance,
but it was awkwardly jointed, jerky, still
keeping step with the madman, defying chance.
Minutes, however, maintained the number drill,
only shocked by spasmodic intakes of breath.
The one fact was the hour's sharp fixture of death.
SPEEDING UP TIME
If you speed up time, the Solar System
all its ellipses, will be seen as a nest
of revolving cams, comets a diadem
turning within it in spirograph lacing,
and the galaxy's catherine-wheel like a crest
burning its helmet. Slower, and snows jumping
from the North Pole to South like a biretta
swapping about, and the cyclones are eddies
at the bottom of waterfalls. Trees set a
pace with their opening umbrellas, grass
hurries from its green into grey. The world wears sashes
and then tears them to shreds, the flowers but flashes.
GALAXY
Like a discus the galaxy, but hurled for
no competition. It spirals scintillant,
weaving wreaths for no conqueror in a war,
victor in sport, maiden in spring. A nova
sends an outblooming globe, an eclaircisssement
brilliant beyond belief, but there's no thinker
disabused of his ignorance. It takes light
hundreds of years to cross it from side to side,
but there's no one to measure it, and what might
one settle on as a 'year'? Must put aside
all these human attempts. Its enormity
is a blank: where the grandeur, the sublimity?
JUPITER
Draw a stick through the stagnant rainbow water —
see in its trail Jupiter-eddies. The zones
on the planet slide loose, turning athwart the
spin like the ends of logs underneath a plank
on which someone is gliding; massive grindstones
made out of methane, ammonia, swirl in rank
upon rank where the Earth would be lost, a bead
stirred in a turbine. Marbling gigantically
convoluting, each tentacle-centipede
spiralling spirals in turn, erratically
fixed to rhythm in tangling up knot with knot
while obsessively dandling the Great Red Spot.
ALL THE GALAXIES
All the galaxies, said the astronomer,
spread over space like the webbing in a sponge.
They inhabit the crannies of foam thinner
than the most high-quality vacuum that
we can make in our labs. the light-years expunge
far in the past any present. No 'Fiat
Lux' can reach through this froth, with each glint spinning
slow constellations that show themselves as skies
over planets, sublime from the beginning
history offers. Aeon-froth where sunrise
is an atom's spinning, year a sundial's,
and a civilization a fortnight's trials.