. . . in progress . . .
Notness
sonnets
I believe that if one takes Einstein’s general relativity seriously,
one must allow for the possiblity that spacetime ties itself in knots
and that information gets lost in the folds.
Stephen Hawking, June 21, 1997,
lecture at the Amsterdam Symposium on
Gravity, Black Holes, and Strings
I dreamed I slept
From a note by Ivo Andrić
I dreamed I slept, and in that sleep I dreamed,
and from that double dream interior woke
and walked in a closed courtyard. Someone spoke
behind me, and I turned. A dark girl beamed
brown eyes at me. I gazed. 'Just as you seemed
in dream to dream, so by the double stroke
of waking into waking, from this yoke
you’ve shouldered, may you be redeemed.'
So when I enter my last mortal sleep,
after all dreams have gone, and I am dead,
will then I wake and, doubly waking, keep
some mirror of that garden in my head
and, back inside it, rising from the deep
distress of death, sleepwalk, or wake instead?
True to your absence, glory
To honour and remember Jacques Derrida,
b. 15 July 1930 - d. 8 October 2004
Is glory in the residue, mere evidence,
in shining track, in afterglow, in spoor?
Being too poor to meet you in your residence
I plead with glory, greet me at your door,
fully resplendent, present, now, revealed
hostlike to your main tenant in this space?
But you come always partially concealed
in mist, with indistinctly profiled face
hanging in haze, ghostlike. We shall remain
true to your absence, glory, seeing you are
bright only as a long exploded star,
a mote in darkness, spreading like a stain,
present but in the shrinking and the swelling,
their course in timespace, and their aftertelling.
Radiance, palpable
In memory of Ilias Layios
Time is a chance we cannot choose but take.
Outside it, from this world at least, the odds
are nought to zero. Push our luck and break
rank from all other runners, not being gods?
If we’d been brought to life through play or mime
into some scarcely recognizable vast
non-time, un-time, anterior-to-time,
in which the very pastness of the past
had turned (or has, or even will have turned)
into radiance, palpable – to a glory
so overspilling presence that the burned
frayed, shredded day-ends of our story
dissolved – then, might we really take our chance
to be, outside of being, in that radiance?
Soul of my soul
Soul of my soul, my soul’s inner retreat
and nucleus, you still innermost space
that occupy no space yet light her face
in glance of recognition when we meet –
you, instant commonplace on way or street
as stone but quite untouchable in place
being her possessionless pure grace
and miracle – here, gone – too bittersweet
for being instantaneous, lacking name,
beginningless, unpassing, without end –
movement through leaves, sensed radiance and sheen
in all things, yet yourself always unseen –
in me be present yet and through me send
breath, spirit, ghost and extasy of flame.
Bogomil
For Francis Jones
Whether a hinted half-traced face appears –
sudden in dark or light – from the last wave
of grief that beat and carved onto this grave
some message that might mock oncoming years,
like Rest In Peace, in spite of mourners’ tears –
or whether doubt, dread, terror made them rave
because from nothing, they might nothing save
of sweet life and its sultry atmospheres –
if you could scry that face, might you then give
meanings back to lost symbols spelt upon
summers in Sumer or in Babylon –
and so, by tracing serifs, sift or seive
in nets of light, worlds still to come, or gone,
or snatch them through dark glass, in negative?
Though numbed by passing
Though numbed by passing and surpassing fear
and bound to being on this trembling ground
I stand on all the while you spin me round
the axis of a passion or a year –
giddied I listen, having no choice but hear
your song composed of noteless silent sound
as if unhemmed, and your whole nature crowned
in hints caught up in waves – now blurred, now near.
Over the waters, shimmering, a face
I’ve half thought yours appears to smile and call,
and back I call, Time – come – I am the space
you long to lodge in and take over all
the darkest corners from and light in grace
unsure if still I stumble, rise, or fall.
My motive falters
My stoic motive falters. I’ve grown weak.
My longing to be loved, to be admired,
ranks higher with me than to be inspired –
each time I parrot clichés as I speak.
I want not to be true, but called unique
for phrases I have fashionably acquired
and so be held desirable, desired
by those I least respect! What fraud or freak
stuffed brimful with obtuseness and inanity,
crass vacancy, ingratiating vanity,
could less inspire, excite, interest, amuse
than I, in substituting tastes and views,
wit and cuteness, for truth? Time to cut down,
Pompous old fool, false self-regarding clown.
Me from the Future
The opposite of yet is not not yet.
The antonym for not yet is already.
Is what is gotten bygone? I forget
but take this gradual waking slow and steady.
Each day I wake to plenty, and still more
(to come, to be, to be-come) swells and calls
me from the future marked not yet, in store,
Plashing through fountains, streams and waterfalls.
yet seems to have a question mark beside.
Before comes not. Doubt and surprise come after.
This dialectic, after one has died,
runs out like air and water, leaves and laughter.
Me from the future? Not yet quite awake?
Here do I hear the end of my time break?
Insomniac Presence
To wake up, and to be – being wide awake –
are different. The first calls Dawn, Arising,
a first sun pouring light across the lake,
a light for seeing through, not analysing;
night, past and gone, a drowned wreck fast capsizing
under the ghosthood of its foamless wake,
gives way, itself away, all compromising,
and brittle vials of dark expand and break.
But I dream of a being that can’t sleep
whose constant state is steadily aware
of all that is, and can be, anywhere.
Insomniac presence, missing you, I weep
denied in thought-knots as I watch and keep
calling for you, on you, who are not there.
A Gift
You, other, fellow, person, human, neighbour,
whose kin cannot be proved, who yet are kin,
though strange, and stranger far for being within,
you, sharer and divider of this labour
I toil at here – what for? who for? for you?
Or for my vanity? or therapy? or pride? –
What will you make of this once I have died
and you glance at or through, yet can’t gaze through?
Our only rendezvous, sole meeting place
is here, among, in, through, beneath, behind
these plural words, and in their virtual space,
for here we greet and touch, as kin, as kind.
So, singular, far friend, although your face
is stranger, here we meet in heart and mind.