The Wave Hennets: Waves
WAVE CANCELLING WAVE
Watch these ripples go through each other. One wave
makes enough of a change to be the other --
it's the other's change too -- he's managed to save
his face wholly from drowning by not letting
himself overwhelm him. Can't say they smother
all their force when they cancel by flattening
smooth -- their tensions concede a calm that can solve
by exalting that trough through making low all
of that peak. Even when they've had to revolve
all their problems, as when some violent squall
had uplifted the depths, there comes a clearance
through diffraction, through fretted interference.
WATER SURFACE
Could say 'silk' for the actual texture. Water
slips by defining. Mellifluent smoothness
of its transparent muscles pulling tauter,
easing to languor, with skin's sleek adjustment
to the impulse beneath, keeping a flawless
truce with the passion aroused, so that a current,
in its swing to a curve, seeks only to fuse
braids to a soft gnurling, the sunlight inlaid
in such grace with supple darkness that you lose
track of the leopard-dazzle, masquerade
of an eeling and oiling. Consummate skill,
so unlike opposition of human will.
WEEDS IN WATER
Under waves watch the seaweed easily eel
itself left and then right, tangled only when
the invisible water seems to congeal
into will-lessness, peel off random strayers
till they're stretched straight to current impulse, and then
leave them horrid like hair in fright, as swayers
who have lost faith in leaders. Under rivers
see the finest of filaments aligning
all their growth to the clear strength, their quivers
but adjusting to whims not theirs, untwining
any knots at a nudge. In this agate stone
see the frailest of fibres solid as bone.
RIVAL WAVES
On the river two sets of waves went at right
angles to each other. First my eye saw this
one in motion. No deception in the sight:
all that was background was dross, combed across
by the eager advancers who could dismiss
all that was not in their direction, could gloss
such irrelevance over when massed in such
ranks of agreement, such reiteration
of the one way to go. I didn't do much,
movelessly switched my brain's interpretation,
and the other waves gained the sway, all running
by their own lights, like clowns who win by punning.
WAVES AGAINST WAVES
Call them fault-lines, where waves intersect and their
neatness is compromised, out of step, line lost
to a zigzag, the lattice fractured, a stair
sliding across a flapping flag, its emblem
never strict to design, one matrix embossed
slightly askew to another, as flotsam,
or an ice-floe in conflict with the jigsaw.
Which then the genuine point of origin?
Is it these that must override those? The law
gathers the wind, enforcing its discipline
to declare it a fault, at odds with its schemes.
Imperfections in crystals flash fickle beams.
WAVES ACROSS WAVES
They can pass through each other without any
hurt. Zebra crescents, cloud-tinted, smoothly slide
under — or is it over? — a field tenné,
antelope-bounding. They settle reflections
in a cellular acquiescence. They glide
off with a cusp of a tree, a selection
that is theirs and no other's, but are yielding it
suddenly elsewhere. Sun blots are blinking this
way and that in surrender, swift to submit,
pliantly incandescent as the waves kiss
or move on. There's no hurt in will or caprice,
for whatever their strife, it issues in peace.
RIPPLES
Two gulls washing themselves, dipping and dipping
heads to throw water over their backs. Circles
within circles, each later, each one clipping
seconds from time and then carrying them on
into space to the future. Each engirdles
where it began. As sure as a photon,
it points back to its origin. As a tree's
rings have chronicled years, here's a record
of what's happened just now, and, in their degrees,
energy past. Every pair moving toward
intersection where time meets with time and space
meets with space. See the universe interlace.
INTERFERENCE PATTERNS
Interference. Two rafts of waves are drifting
over each other. A pretty compromise
or a fretting apart? Between the rifting
on go the ripples unheeding, but between
them are bickerings, cancellings, that the eyes
wince at and struggle to hold, a damascene
frontier, duelling, melting, making something
nothing, and nothing a double or triple
in riposte or attack, closing, opening
wide in a V, all their pulses a-tipple
in a helpless frustration. They cannot see
where the moiré enmazings strangely agree.
WAVES OVER WAVES
There are trellises prettily tripped as they
diamondize plaid. Nettings interlace scissorings
syncopatedly. Linkings of steel moiré
ply a live woodgrain in strict hesitations.
Pulling corners of webs sends fire-suturings
serpentine over leather. Aberrations
of a picture on television twist reeds
into a lolling basketry. Melting combs
trace diagonals where a harp intercedes.
Cymbals of sunlight are clashed with metronomes
of a drapery's vagaries. Depiction,
says memory, weaves the real with fiction.
CONFUSION OF WAVES
There've been so many boats all at once the whole
river is busy with waves. It's like gossip,
all a-flutter, or on the surface a shoal
frantic with fear or annual ecstasy.
These vibrations feel each other, dip and flip
with interanimation of secrecy
and publicity, shame and condemnation,
panic and plan. In this chaos there's order
for these glints and these darks keep in equation,
flicker anew in the same place. The water,
if you look at these leaves, stays strictly sublime,
like arenas of space or aeons of time.
WAKE
In the wake of this outboard-motor there spread
bulgings, upwellings, glossy cobbles, kidneys
in convulsion. Beneath, propeller-blades thread
evenness into spiralling vertigo.
These upheavings, renewing convexities,
strivings against the air, are performing fury,
passion or anguish: see the shocked involvement
in the tumbling collapse, in the unruly
whirling of what was restrained, extravagant
in anarchic outflowing. Drifting afar,
all the seething is soothed. It heals like a scar.
BOW-WAVES FROM THE DUCKS
As the ducks swim ahead, from each goes a V
braided of waves, within which the upwellings
spread to widening rounds in a rivalry
forward and back, overlaid with eyebrow-curved
rows advancing. All show where the propellings
moments ago had been. Where the ducks have swerved,
twin parabolas plait braids with sliding knots,
knitting unknit in smoothness, supple conflict
of two wills in the water where each allots
justice to each. See none of them contradict,
seeking measure in tangling lyre upon lyre,
in this chaos exactly matching desire.
SHIFT OF ATTENTION
If you hold the reflection now, all you see
over the water are melting malachite
ovals, circles awry, in a filagree
marbling that stirs what the tree was to op art
turned kinetic, an endless debate in light
trying to settle what must be set apart
if the sight of the tree is to become true.
Pulling and pushing the elastic image --
what confusion is kept in play! But if you
focus instead on the waves, then every ridge
is a running in rhythm, and malachite
but a passing effect a tree draws on sight.
WAVES ON THE UNDERSIDE OF A BRIDGE
First you'd say that reflections of the ripples
played on the underside of the bridge, But next
you remember it's light. Nothing there jiggles
netting through nets that bounce; no mountain ranges
are flip-flopping their gold horizons; no text,
scribed in an alphabet that's alive, changes
all its fonts in a fever of re-drafting;
not an oscilloscope, for nobody's there
to take measurements from it. Not an arc-ing
brilliance searing through naked stone; no
hair of a maenad pursued, drawn ever tighter:
it's no more than the stone a little brighter.
UNDER THE STRONG BREEZE
There's a palpitating under this submissive
skin. These folds of expression must betray
what has happened just now, in a fugitive
glance. They advance, it would seem, in parallel,
but the eye can discern across the plissé
neatness recalcitrant impulse, a rebel
frown. Parade of the willing, urging equal
lineaments, a following in smiling,
an obsequious nodding, but skeletal
grins skim like ghosts underneath. Reconciling
isn't cheerful rapport of masters and slaves:
it's a dubious waiving of inmost waves.
CAT'S-PAWS
Sudden gnurling that fades. The wind is grazing
water that heals without pain. It is a fan
that must close as it opens, a brisk raising,
brushed away brushing, of the nap of this cloth.
Sweep of tiniest spray, that skims as you scan,
spreads to its limit, has vanished. Swift gray swath,
reaping sheaves of a dusty zinc that is no
harvest. The waves are only a second's length,
going wrinkles to smooth in prestissimo
tempo. The wind changes direction and strength
and they burst from a centre, abrupt mushroom
declamation with calm at the heart of doom.
WHAT WE MISS
All these waves going somewhere are the water
staying exactly where it is. All the air
that lies over the waves is a replica,
moulding along with them, but invisibly.
As we look at the crests, we are unaware
troughs can exist. Sun that is indelibly
in a brilliant scribble from here can't be
seen if we move, for from there the water writes
in a black ink. These combers, out on the sea
rose on resistless. Throughout this candlelight's
poise, as composed as an antique ceramic,
races the waves' incandescent dynamic.
ONE-WAY WAVES
These are one-way waves, trim in their direction
down with the river. Irregular evenness,
ruled discordance, sure capricious selection,
unbound submission, compensating others
in their own rise and fall, marching in lawless
order, a broad complicity that smothers
only willing opponents, forward leaning
ready to vanish, urgent for frustration
like air's flagellants, never overweening
even when cresting the sunlight. Causation
as desire; in authority no cross;
in castration no lack; in selfhood no loss.
CHOICES
Select motion, but which? First take the river,
froth from the weir, and the leaves, show it drifting,
a broad surface past fields and trees. A quiver
catches the eye and you're following ripples
and they go somewhere else, dipping froth, lifting
leaves, and here making wrinkles, grinnings, dimples,
out of would-be reflections. Like a relay
baton, attention is snatched by a figure
that is upside-down, whittling itself in play
walking along through leaves and ripple-glitter,
as fragmenting as trees' flapping reflections.
Thus does vision pursue endless corrections.
A WAVE IS A JOKE
And a wave is a joke. The same thing returns
altered without alteration. See that leaf
shows the current has moved: as the same word earns
laughter because fear or desire were humbler
till the shift from the harmless. There is a thief
steals from the context, this plastic beer-tumbler,
fag-end, condom, or Cola-bottle, and this
same wave must dandle it with fastidious
yet quite accurate judgement. You will not miss
punchlines that wobble below the belt, conscious
from the unconscious. Turn the dead fish up
with a neat to-and-fro as actress said to bishop.
STATIONARY WAVES
With the water now flowing faster the waves
move at a stand, like that illusion in which
when you've stared at a wheel, something still behaves,
quite against reason, as if it's in motion.
Nowhere going, these waves continuously switch
being in stationary commotion,
handing on what is floating like history,
clothed for a moment with the glint of bubbles,
penetrated by twigs as by memory,
kissing a leaf, lit from under by doubles
of themselves. Like Alice and the Red Queen,
they are racing along to stay where they've been.
EMPHASES
There are waves that are crossing each other here:
this is now going over that -- now that, this.
But attend to the sea's waves, you'll see the pier
drift like a ship -- look only at the supports
and the waves are what's moving. One emphasis,
made as you look from the train, when you've stopped, distorts
the unmoving to motion. In full career,
see all the telephone wires rise to a beat,
and the cutting, years old, convulse in fear.
Ripples in cirrus, miles above, are as neat
as the ribbed sand at ebb -- what distance might freeze
though from here, is reality's vortices.
EDDIES (I)
Call an eddy a vertical wave. Sigma's
spiral with eta's and xi's, turn Arabic
or extend into free extravaganzas
over the manuscript, swifter in-swirling
as the more they're determined. These syllabic
buckles and kinks in a flexuous curling
are but tracing invisible influence,
tops whipped by wordless involvements deep below,
that must catch at a straw, affect dalliance
framed in a running-dog frieze, a vertigo
writ, obedient licence, passive alarm
that must follow the pen till twirled into calm.
EDDIES (II)
At the edge of the oar are eddies twirling,
going, it seems, both ways, acknowledging the beat
and the water. Two currents blend by swirling
difference node-like, and drawing dimpling down
to the peace underneath. A lyrical throat.
Dancer unfurling herself of a clear gown
made of shadow and sky. There's a clown's chuckle,
almost a wink. See one catch hands with a twig,
whirl it round and release it. Watch it buckle
all the reflections and make a whirligig
of the straightest of edges, a mad painter.
See them dwindling behind, fainter and fainter.
SEEN ON THE BOTTOM OF THE SWIMMING-POOL
Wearing goggles. The floor of the swimming-pool
netted with light, a net whose holes swell and shrink
and then vanish in nodes of gold. Reticule
blown in the wind, nerve circuits twitching in flesh.
The waves' lenses are bending lights till they blink,
spark incandescent, stretch and snap in a mesh
that is utterly loose on the tiles' rigid squares,
catching at nothing. Above, electric filaments
race their infinitesimal burr: these hairs
slink syncopatedly slow, as revenants
of their origin, stirred to paroxysm
as a swimmer goes past, unaware of them.
IN THE LINER'S SWIMMING-BATH
As we swam in the liner's swimming-bath, its
waves all behaved strangely. There were those we made,
crossing this way and that, and then there were fits,
sudden and large, of waves where the whole pool heaved
to another vibration. We all were swayed
shifting together, and together deceived
by the stillness between each of us. Looked at
her and it seemed we weren't moving, except for
what we needed to swim, but, no longer flat,
water was tilting us onwards, evermore
from our goal of the moment, made us sidle
to a rhythm unseen and more powerful.
SMOKE-RING
In a smoke-ring a torus is an eddy,
turning upon itself, trapping at its heart
a few motes it will hug in an unsteady
sketch of a real thing in fluent, lucent,
silken piping, delicate tubular art
breath, that has made, can at once with negligent
sigh dismiss into fading chaos. It kept
with its identity in tremulous wave
onwards, timidly challenging time, and swept
new air around itself, managing to save
the old impulse in new, as faint as a shroud.
It's more certain than that in the mushroom cloud.
A STANDING WAVE
There are waves in the coffee-maker. A drop
falls in the centre, and wave-circles fly out
to the edge and then shrink back where the next plop
hurries them out once again. But the timing
slowly changes, and where once there was no doubt,
pulse matching pulse, a reciprocal chiming
of the power of drop and of wave, the new
wave and the old come to a strange stand, flipping
up and down without moving their place, a due
compromise reached between rivals, no tripping
of each other up, with neither dominant --
but it's gone, for it only lasts an instant.
WATER-SPHERES
There's no name for these water-spheres. See them form
there in the coffee-maker. Bounced by a drop
into being, they run outward in a swarm,
each with a tiny bright crescent moon inside,
as precise as a baby's fingernail, hop
over a wave, or else pop. A silent glide
is their motion, no friction (water touching
water must be the most delicate contact
in the world!). And some shrink as they go, leaking
molecules somewhere, holding to an exact
shining sphere to the last. Where they died, they kissed.
Though their time is an instant, they still exist.
RAINDROPS ON THE RIVER (I)
In this downpour the raindrops on the river
make their own targets but can't keep them steady,
fading with age in a second, the newer
hoping their impact will be sharper. The space
is of moon-craters flattening already,
aeons become instants. Circles interlace
as Venn diagrams, logicless. A chain mail
safe against none of these missiles that are made
out of water as well. Brisk punchings of braille
only the sighted could read, but overlaid
before anyone could. It is just the same
with this rain, that is overlaid with a name.
RAINDROPS ON THE RIVER (II)
On the surface of the river the raindrops.
Rushing down hundreds of tunnels all at once
with the rings of the ribs fading round you, all
made of a quicksilver steel. Here it's the shot
that is making the targets, potting response
out of faceless universe. Knot with knot
interlacing Olympic and at random,
frantic to keep them unchained over fainter
circles widening fainter still. In tandem
suddenly two grow and die, the remainder
in a spasmodic dance. Just rain descending.
What cafuffles for a blending with blending!
RAINDROPS ON A PUDDLE
On the tabula rasa of the rain pool,
still save for them, bubbles, little hemispheres,
come to burst one by one – or two – three! No rule
is kept in their random precision, each printing
out a widening circle which disappears
far from the origin it was still ringing,
which go fading, enlarging at a rate all
circles exactly obey, indifferent
to the old, to the new, across which they fall
certain in being, eagerly existent
in desire to expand. Such vigour won't cease
until every one's reached that motionless peace.
FLOATING OBJECTS
On the water are things floating: a bottle,
tilted; some leaves; a log; some duckweed wafers,
like confetti, but limp. Along a ripple
comes, keeping rank with itself in a blank curve.
First, the bottle goes curtseying, registers
loony surprise, pointing here only to swerve
there too late to catch anything of what made
mock of its promptness to follow. Then the leaves
up-end this end, then up-end that, a parade
bobbing obeisance. The duckweed now receives
all the wave like a well-fitting coat. Mocking
ripples isn't for logs, with their own rocking.
DIAMONDS IN THE GUTTER
You have seen how those waves moved through water but
left it behind. Look at these, standing criss-crossed
on the surface, as crisp as a diamond-cut-
glass, its diagonal crystals held trembling
in the gutter, each scrap of grit or mud glossed
over and trailing its silver-glittering
wake in semblance of self, intersecting blades
ruling each other out without cutting or
ever breaking reflections. These liquid braids
bind the exultantly free. Neither rise nor
dip prevents the escape -- where else could it go? --
for this waving's the only way it can flow.
AIR AND WAVE
Don't imagine the wave is just the water's.
Air is as much in dip and rise, hollowing
to each crest, filling full each groove. The power's
plainly not just in the sea, a complacent
single thrust owing nothing to what's blowing
now, nor as plainly only the wind, constant
in its bluster, that governs with sovereign
sway where the waves go. There, those crests are brushed
by the breeze and fly elsewhere: here, air's caught in
foldings of foam, and what was free is now rushed
in a bubble, astonished, dazzled with thrills.
It's a struggling embrace, this sharing of wills.
DROPS
All these drops on the underside of the gate
fall at their own rhythm. The surface tension
must enforce all their shape, determine their fate
here from a knuckle to a nipple, to pear
and to ball, but the timing's their invention.
Plops in haphazard impact share and don't share
simultaneity, but all the players
keep to their strict campanological score.
They are finding their art, combining layers
into the past where they'll lie unchanged in store
with the store of all the other waves, now latent,
that are keeping the cosmos in the present.
TRANSPARENCY
Since the ripples let light through them, could say
they have nothing to do with it -- beautiful
nothing! Nothing that makes them all light. A ray
perhaps dives out of true, but it doesn't lie
in an opaque sobriety. Mineral
spars have fixed peccadillos that turn awry
what you see, or go double, always the same,
but a wave goes adapting its brilliant
see-through mirrors, cocking snooks at open shame,
rocking swimmers like wine in intoxicant
nothing -- sweetest effacement's what you might call
it. as long as you're missing nothing at all.
AUTUMN LEAVES ON THE RIVER
A procession: look up or down it's the same
shifting of history, save that they're growing
out of nothing but mirrored sun-sparks, their aim
down there to dwindle to shadow. Here and now
they are hurrying, wavering, all flowing
whether in rings or in files or anyhow,
whether jolted or cushioned, danced or flattened.
One wave will shake them in turn, each with a tinge
that they share with another. This one burdened
sinks underneath: that one swivels on a hinge
back and forth with the wind. They drift with the flood,
with their colours as money, banners, or blood.
WAVES AT A DISTANCE
It's a flock of birds, startled, about to rise
over and over again. Now it's a crowd
and their mouths are all shouting soundless surprise.
Phi Effects zither glints in a nervous glee
but their randomness rhythms. Then a dark cloud
shadows them all, makes all their activity
twitch a gooseflesh of lead and ash. The full sun
come back, a blaze of mosaic resetting
and resetting in seconds. A machine-gun
fires a green tracer over vision, fretting
a stretched harlequin, sequinned. Not as frightening
as that image of Joyce's: 'scrotum-tightening'.
FEELING WAVES
Feel the waves with your sight. Ten pencils rolling
under the palm of your hand, jittering in
a light-tickling smoothness. Ribbed sand scrolling
under your bare feet. Corduroy slipping through
between fingers, the furrows thrumming the skin.
Cats'-paws like files. Bow-wave turned like a corkscrew.
In the upwelling wake, kidney-iron. Coiling
eddy as dimple or navel. A criss-cross
of two ranks is a pine-cone. All the boiling
bubbles are white lava, coral, bounding moss.
And the big waves are women's curves. Best to live
with all senses alert for what they can give.
PHOTOS OF WAVES
In the Craft Fair a stall was selling photos
taken of water, instant and instance
of the rhythm of waves as intaglios,
scoring a now from the past into present
eyes, for see how these are in neat consequence
ready to lift in the place of the absent.
Did they ever succeed if no one turned to
look after taking the snap? — no one even
naming water as 'water' or the tattoo
given to light-waves as 'motion'? The pattern
now unfolds to an eye its seams, pleats and tucks
as it sews an identity onto flux.
TIME
Again: waves aren't the water -- it's just our eyes
finding a kind of moiré. The up-and-down
of the water is hidden, waves a disguise
hard to ignore. But see today the duckweed,
an ironic confetti, each bobbing clown,
jack-in-a-box, see-sawing child, shows it's freed
from the moody onsprawling beneath, making
all of the sullen obsession with motive
given minutes ago into mistaking
present for future or past. An elusive
pert élan that affects a mocking shiver.
They don't know that they're moving with the river.
IDENTITIES
These are old waves supported by the new, or
new by the old, their identities merging
as the water they were changes as they draw
selfhood along. See those leaves give them away,
individual presence, instant urging
upwards and downwards, no more than a relay
that the old give the new and the new the old,
thinking their self-sameness a guarantee
of their oneness eternal, where they have rolled
purest of signs for all they will ever be,
with each leaf and each drop left a mystery
as they widen and fade into history.
BIG WAVES
A big boat very fast. Waves shocking in size.
Strange to see waves as if magnified, grosser
in their reach and their wallow, asserting rise,
spread, scoop and rigour over all the smaller
waves, and thrusting their height at the banks closer,
bolder, a bullying swash growing taller
at resistance, and resolute in lunging
back in huge ranks diagonal over those
coming in, till they meet and make a plunging
second bow-wave with no boat there, counterblows
hurling spray as in sheaves or like flying fish.
Feel them sicken, invigorate, at a wish.
WAVES IN THE GALE
On this morning the gale strikes the river all
ways. There are big waves that are slicing the sky
into winking ellipses. Across them fall
driftings of lesser waves, sharper in their ranks,
far more uniform: if they catch the eye,
that is no more than you'll see. Out from the banks
there come sweeping the cats'-paws, dashing their matt
fans in a firework effacement of image,
like some spray-can graffiti, or acrobat
leaping for nothing -- losing their sacrilege
in a flash. See how the waves in all their guises
still effecting, unchanged, their compromises.
STORM WAVES ON THE CAM
In the gale of that January the wind
blew from the west right along the Cam and drove
all the waves that were there into disciplined
and accumulate ranks, as if dolphins swam
in long lines, as if now the hurricane wove
order from chaos, tumult to dithyramb.
Seemed not one Severn Bore but an endless train
heaved by in dreamlike obsession, crest to trough
over four feet or more. There, forced to remain
swimming, quite unable to choose to fly off,
all the swans and the ducks had made shift to save
themselves, riding the roller-coaster of wave.
STORM WAVES
They are lavish in anger. This is excess
trying to find no place to stop. See the spray
at a reach for the last enemy, the stress
downward on pebbles that grates as deep as
to the deepest down that is shifting away
infinitesimal energy that has
overreached. Wave must finger frustration at
last, a despair that makes gigantic returns,
an inevitable pulsation at
odds with its own mass, valkyrie climax that spurns
both the sea as the cause and the land as effect.
They're the gale -- not the gale -- no bar can deflect.
THUNDERSTORM
Now the sky hides its distance in gloom, a space
menacing-vast of no shape, concealing its plots,
slapping rain near and far, keeping busy pace
chiming the here-now with the then of the street
yards away. Then the lightning flapping its shots,
secret in silence for seconds, each a cheat
rife with the ripping of mile-wide sheets of brass,
gong turned to Kodo drum. Above, convection
lifts the anvil to sunlight: little can pass
down but this twilight-cathedral puce, pigeon-
purple slate, out of which, with rigour sublime,
every tree, every house is made for this time.
TORNADO
When the windows were sucked out like bubbles, our
ears became soft-stopped with the inverse pressure
and our eyes alone had to cope with power
unmet. The tornado's barrel spun a mile
away, gathering threads in spiral terror
inwards, gasometer-size, ghostly mobile,
as it ground out a path. Trees leaned like seaweed;
slates were blown postage-stamps. Above, a maelstrom
in the clouds, was a black galaxy filmed at speed,
drawing a gross, belly-dancer pillar from
earth with earth's shredded debris. Next day look back
and see how through the town it had torn its track.
A STRANGE ATTRACTOR
On the back of the lorry were flexible
tubes. They were waving about, and being jogged
as they waved, into waving illegible
records of where and of when and of how much they
were disturbed in the proof of how they had dogged,
slavishly prompt, every jolt on the highway
up to here, and were still, as they numbly shrugged,
drunk with their nonchalance, keeping a record
through whatever could happen, as if they hugged
secrets of time and of space, lurching toward
their new future, pure, without any flaws
in their choiceless, endless compliance with cause.