Even God …

Even God …

A small magnet can lift a blade

Though the earth’s mass pulls on it;

So God could make a cubal sphere?

No, even God must obey rules;

Make gravity a bit stronger

And see the stars become black holes;

Make gravity a bit weaker

And see no stars in the first place;

This is his cosmic quandary:

God does not have maker’s freedom;

In the milk mist of Mount Sinai

He wrote law on tablets of stone;

The people made a golden calf;

Ashes and water was their fill;

Moses smashed the idol to bits;

The Levites killed thousands of them;

They bled divine retribution;

God made brand new tablets of stone;

He broke the rule ‘Thou shalt not kill’;

Yes, even God must obey the rules.

Job the Doubter

Job the Doubter

There is Job at the end of his tether,

Pulling his hair out on his gray ash-heap;

He doubts everything even his God;

But Job still has a keen sense of wonder;

Where does the light come from?

And how do hail stones form?

These are physics questions;

The laws of physics rule;

Where do these laws come from?

This is the job of science.

Higgs Boson

Higgs Boson

Hold your breath: In the cathedral of collisions

The priests of particles have prayed the physics,

The scalar particle has been revealed to them;

A probability sift through collision events says

it exists in the rich jiggle of the cosmic vacuum;

The universal field of charge moves in mysterious ways;

Blessing electrons with mass, promoting atomic communion

But the boson is unstable; it lasts a fraction of a second

Before it becomes quarks and leptons;

The mind of creation is observed in modes of decay;

But it is no less numinous.

Oblique Walter Benjamin

Oblique Walter Benjamin

Myopia forced him to bend to the smear of street

Just in case someone he well knew but could not see felt

he was ignoring them. He seemed to see obliquely,

yet he could at a glance absorb the bustling lifescape.

In precise portraits of himself he does not appear,

Not at the corner of Steglitzer and Genthiner;

But everything on the street was a hint to him:

Stars, faces, animals, landscapes, dishes for Seder.

Every evening he walked through the wide gate arch

Down the long drive to visit his girlfriend in her house;

From the time she moved the opening of the gate arch

Lay before him like an ear that had lost its hearing.

All the things he took in were knowable in their names;

He glimpsed tales in the rattling down of roll-up shutters;

He thought all things without chance live in translation,

Meaningful however garbled the interpretation.

He found that an out-of-date stamp on an envelope

Can say much more than the pages still folded inside;

A stamped postcard was like a page by an old master

With two different drawings on recto and verso. 

He watched while he waited to interpret,

Cultivating solitude as a pot grows cactus,

Longing to be anywhere but the place where he was,

His whole demeanour asking to pass by unnoticed.

He saw riches in the glass-covered shopping arcades,

In the graffiti of the Paris of Baudelaire,

Where the exhumed detritus of ruined time spoke to him;

He sought to bring then into constellation with now.

He was a pearl diver into the depths of the past,

A lone retriever of meaning from the obsolete;

Reflecting on ruin, he did not rule out redemption;

What civilisation produced was worth analysis.

He had faith in our ability to explain art

Where form and content encounter critical judgment;

He felt obliged to illuminate an open space

For ethical inquiry into the point of things.

He sought to recover a tongue of equals for whom

truth is the answer to the challenge of inquiry,

including the truth that spellbinds the lifeful art work;

His life was a dialectical poem of longing.

Maths Man

Maths Man

I met a man pushing his bike through Garryvoe

Going to Midleton for hinges and handles;

A Pythagorean, he spoke holy numbers:

We are number threads on a mathematical spindle;

A circle’s circumference is Pi times twice the radius;

Pi = 3.1415 with the series after the decimal point

Going on forever; this number is irrational;

The ratio that results when a plank is divided

Is that the ratio of the longer bit to the whole,

Equals the ratio of the shorter to the longer;

This golden mean 1.618 runs forever;

There is infinity between one and zero;

In fact the glut of fractions is never-ending;

He knew a farmer in Shanagarry whose mind

Archived cattle prices from the sixties onward

‘Now you know why I push my bike;

Numbers drive you crazy.’  Poor Gödel,

He found some math propositions unprovable;

Isolated, he died because he would not eat;

We live in geometry – that’s a finished fact;

He said: I can divide one infinitely small;

I can divide the road to Midleton in half

And each half infinitely down to a bare inch

And take the inch of tar and divide forever;

If there is always road to divide I am trapped;

Cycling to Midleton becomes impossible;

If I outraced light into Ballinacurra,

You would see me coming back, younger than my twin;

It’s the infinity thing that drives one crazy;

However big a number is you can add one;

But he said: The road will end in a particle;

It could be an electron Marlon Brando spat

When he cursed the censorious bishop of Cloyne;

So the end of his trek would be a quantum leap;

He might spin particulate to Ballycotton;

Mounting his bike he said God’s mathematical

mind had fully embraced her inner equations;

For God the mechanic numbers were numinous;

For numbers score the music of the universe.

Mongrel Doorway

Mongrel Doorway

The Sangemini doorway recycles stone

from Roman ruins, and statues that fell inscribed;

Two half lions crouch from pre-Romanesque times;

In the doorway jambs there is asymmetry;

On the right jamb’s top the diamond has no tip;

The tip is incised into the lintel stone;

Yet the grapevine beside the diamond pattern

Grows straight without break onto the lintel;

When it reaches the lintel the jamb-centred

plain vertical moulding becomes bead-and-reel;

Only the grapevine has a smooth transition;

The acanthus vine and leaves vary in style;

The ornamental styles are exuberant:

Different stone masons meet at their edges;

Sprawling acanthus vine with wild animals

and hunters Langobardise the left jamb;

pear faces ripen under Umbria’s sky;

Ready to feed the hot and hungry reapers,

A kind angel bears a fresh-baked panini,

And a cook blows his horn and stirs the porridge;

a bird eyes her chicks while a snake slithers close;

and three hounds harry tomorrow’s wild-boar feast;

The line of acanthus leaves on the lintel

Stands out in a crisp Byzantine silhouette

And stretches across with a sure Syrian touch;

The carved stag-to-stag is a Christian symbol;

But the eagle between the stags is pagan;

The quatrefoil rosettes and the leafy sprays

Chant their tune in plain Gothic naturalism.

Marble migrant in the Metropolitan,

This hand-made cultural cosmopolitan,

Had its home on the Flaminian Way,

Once held to the lintel by travertine blocks,

in the ruined abbey church of San Nicolo,

Founded by the old counts of Sangemini

Who bound the monks to say unceasing prayers

for the salvation of their Umbrian souls;

Its dazzle lies in its lively mongrel mix;

Human beings must effloresce exuberant

In the vitality of diversity;

The bells of Danilov peal

When Gogol died the bells tolled at Danilov.

Stalin shot the monks and stilled the clang.

Sure: Bells may have softened Raskolnikov.

But they did not stay the hands of Stalin’s gang.

Iconic, like the biblical trumpet that extols

God’s bidding, enticing people with the tollen,

These ringing bells were beings with souls.

No wonder they unnerved Napoleon.

The monk says ‘Don’t listen for a chord.’

He swings the clapper on a rope.

An icon of the voice of the Lord,

The pealing bells jangle out in hope.

The bells boom out once again,

The monk’s arms working like a lever.

Though I can never entertain

The reek and hum of religious fervour,

I do accept that every bell has a soul
That sings in every peal and beats in every toll.

Imperfection

Imperfection

God is the maker of the cosmos;

He made all of us in his image;

The voice out of revelation’s fire,

He can never be observed by science;

God is symmetry and perfection

Who rules in a timeless heaven-state;

So he can’t make an imperfect thing;

Yet - we are his unexplained failure;

Driven from the Garden of Eden;

But imperfection is a good thing;

It lies at the core of our physics;

It thrives in the spine fluid of our being;

Flotsam from the fall from perfection;

Big-bang singularity rubbish,

We flux about in quantum wave fields;

Voices out of accidental fire;

Irradiated by existential pain,

Human hearts speak in babel voices,

Search for passionate life-in-common;

Long for a social physical space

That turns into a conversation

On life’s ample possibilities;

But we can’t demand that the cosmos

Justify to the court of reason;

But we can be truly human

In this spontaneous creation;

We can behave with careful scruple,

Be mild in manner, pleasant and kind,

Not retaliate when affronted,

Do business with integrity

Avoid the extremes of prejudice;

On the goat’s road we can sing out loud

The lark song of sensual delight;

We can be frail heroes who inspire

Others to feel glad humans exist;

We can do justice to human hearts;

Find dignity in imperfect selves;

In the field force of the passionate,
Be not afraid of human goodness.

Miles to go

Miles to go

it is saturday night

Ornette Coleman has done the dididahdoodah

of Lonely Woman

now Miles Davis stick-fingers and strong-arms his horn

blowing trumpet

terse

swinging

having a gas

laid down on the track sure but made just then

no fishing for a tone centre

no flatted fifths

just finishing what’s left

playing on but never through

finding a place to leave it

but not letting it die

no one leans on the rhythm section.

everyone stands on their own toes

she says, can’t you see the red jacket

The chain shining against brown skin

he walks his eyes warily

swivels like he’s about to throw a punch

she says you know women in the clubs at night

opened their legs under the tables

when Miles played his horn in the lower register

and they didn’t know it

she bends over looking for Stormy Weather

we improvise

Elusive

Elusive

It is hard as hell to hook the elusive;

You don’t ask a trout to explain fresh water,

Or Forrest Gump to explain his innocence,

Or a mother to unpack loving kindness;

Or a nurse to say why she holds the chill hand

of a soldier whose nightmares deny him sleep;

Or a nun to justify her solitude;

Because he grieves for lost innocence,

Hamlet babbles words that don’t measure up;

A fish flips from the boat into the river;

When we lose what is intrinsically good,
We realise how life-sustaining it was.