Close-Order Drill: Two Sonnets

Have Blue

The tattoo artist’s window illustrates

available designs: classic dragon,

exotic birds whose plumage demonstrates

a fix on the surreal, a scorpion,

or scroll of waves in pin-pricked, briny blue.

A serpent’s convolutions chase the sun –

beneath the hand, a pattern, mapped sinew,

a creatured ink, coiled in blank entreaty.

The role is emblematic, and the zoo

of fabulous intent, the hue, the sea

transcribed to indicate a spirit’s place,

reveal the contours of reality

in ritual detail: encoded space,

the beasts that rise, and scour the interface.

Tour of Duty

My son returns from duty incomplete.

Sniper-fire declassified the cowlick

and the stammer. The honour guard’s drumbeat

instructs our pace, slow… slow, but still too quick

for him to manage on his own. The flag

folds neatly to a nebula of hick

towns shining with these soldiers. If we brag,

it is as the papers note, “died bravely.”

(A holy war presumes a body bag.)

These lost nations, compressed into TV

debriefings, seared, a theatre of war

for belt-strap bombers – Allah vis-à-vis:

the tour of duty ends along this scar

of road we follow in the mourners’ car.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 38

Degrees of Difficulty

There is something in the thaw,

found where he fell, carved by cold,

the face a map from somewhere

to somewhere, or else the skin

blackening as it warms.

In these mountains, centuries pass

like mist in a spring so brief

the birches lay half in one life, half

in a season best forgotten, trunks stooped

and leaves a weak show in thinning air.

If there was a road here

it was in the mind, a hard route in any year

for a foothold hacked with axes.

There was trade beyond these ranges,

home perhaps, or strangers to a stranger.

A quiver’s mush of arrow spurs, leggings

and leather jerkin stuffed with straw—

he climbed into the age of ice

to settle like a debris in our lives.

Our breath lifts out before us on the chill.

These ridges announce the boundaries

of the world, knuckles of vertebrae

beneath a haze of alpine flower,

a.   everything connected each to each

for a life reclaimed from zero.

We are met in these remains,

climbing with little and too late

into a place without name, deep as years,

under a sun the ice tames, a sustenance

in the frozen passes when we return.

The Mountain

At a recent lecture in Stockholm, Professor Stephen Hawking proposed a solution to a long-standing problem in physics, known as the Information Paradox.

Black holes have always posed a problem for physicists, in that they appear to obliterate anything that  passes beyond the Event Horizon - loosely speaking, the outer boundary of the black hole. It's a contradiction, because one of the fundamental laws of the physical universe is that no information is ever lost.

Hawking's proposal is succinct, and also follows back to his own earlier proposal from the 1970s, now termed Hawking Radiation, a strange, quantum mechanical effect peculiar to black holes.

Hawking believes that the information contained in particles about their state is not lost. Rather, the information is retained in the form of a hologram, effectively, a two-dimensional representation of the particle, within the closed circuit of Hawking Radiation at the Event Horizon. Because it's position is thus known, the information can be extrapolated backwards or forwards in time.

This containment, and, correspondingly, transmission of information, Hawking terms Super Translation.

Recently, I climbed a mountain, or at least attempted to do so. I had set off with a small group, the leader of which was a young woman about twenty years of age. Others in the group were in their 30s, all fit and able, all some thirty years younger than me.

We had begun in the heat of the day, with temperatures about 30 Celsius (mid-80s F in old money). The climb began across rough terrain - loose shale underfoot and jagged rocks preventing firm, flat footfall, with low-growing scrub pine and palmetto dragging across feet and legs at every step. The terrain became rougher as the incline became steeper.

There were a couple of three minute breaks, but even after only ninety minutes I was falling thirty or forty meters behind the others. Although reasonably fit for my age, my age itself was an exponential factor in the group. A little further on, and I called to the leader that the pace was too fast for me, and I would have to stand down. Having assured themselves that I would be fine after a short rest and a little water, they continued the ascent, soon out of sight beyond a rocky ridge.

I sat on the edge of a stony outcrop, looking down the mountain at the return route- also difficult - and, farther, out to sea with its brilliant greens shimmering against a cobalt sky.

That the group disappeared could be likened to them falling through the Event Horizon. That I remained in that spot, with knowledge of the group, its members - among them the Italian guide, or the German mechanical engineer from Cologne who had two days earlier proposed to his girlfriend at a beauty spot on the lower slopes, or the Spanish couple who were worried that they wouldn't be back in time to collect their son - placed me in the position of Super Translator, a keeper of particular knowledge, locked within the invisible Horizon, as now, projecting myself backwards and forwards in time.

At no point is information lost. It shifts and shimmers in strange arrays, both past and future winding through, ascending, descending, moving farther, deeper.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 37

The Sirens

In Plato’s Republic, heaven

was theirs, golden rotations in a golden time.

Ulysses knew the song, and in it

the promise of knowledge of all things—

in the rope, in the sailor’s knot

made fast

against the frequency of everything he wanted,

the sweet somnambulance ending on the rocks.

Centuries after, the corpse of one

washed up along the shore, the face nearly human,

grey torso tapering to a faded iridescence.

Strabo the geographer saw her tomb, noting

ceremonies in her memory included

youths vaulting, and races by torch light.

Bring desire, they said, its urgency

and steep precision, bring memory and the promise of all things.

In 1403, in the Netherlands, one appeared

through an opening in an earthen dyke.

Her manner was confused, and she was without language.

Later, she was taught to weave,

and lived on there in Haarlem until she died.

In January’s flat light,

looking seaward, she called to salt, its deepest binding, her voice

many voices, cut-glass above tidal grasses, and the waves

breaking.

After This

I had a dream recently. In this dream, my wife gave birth to a daughter, who had a shock of red hair. The oddness of the dream was reinforced, as is the nature of dreams, by a series of events that had a grounding in my life, with elements of fantasy and religion.

A week after the birth, the child was sitting upright, unaided, and by the end of the month she could walk with ease and confidence. We had told no one about the birth. As dreams allow, the awkward presentation of prior events and illogical exchanges remained unaddressed. Only the child's presence was acknowledged.

By the age of three months, the child had the run of the house, and she could make her own meals, wash, and dress herself. She had grown correspondingly larger now, and was, even though only three months of age, the height and weight of a seven-year-old girl. As yet, her eyes were the only source of emotion or communicative link between us.

One day, we entered her room and found her sitting on the floor on her night dress, which was really just an oversize shirt. Her hair was drenched with sweat, as was the shirt. Her skin was cold to the touch (Previously, we understood that we were not to touch her, and only did so now as we were concerned that she was lapsing into a coma.). Her eyes were closed tightly.

Having satisfied ourselves that she was not convulsing, we simply waited there with her. A while later, which, although a short time in real terms, we knew might have consequences in respect of her accelerated development, she opened her eyes, and spoke for the first time. She said, "I am Sine."

I can't explain it exactly, but apart from the shock of hearing her speak, her words appeared to present themselves in our minds in such a way that the derivation of the words were made apparent. That is, as she pronounced the name, we knew at once that it was Gaelic, spoken as "Sha-Nay." We knew also that the meaning of the name was "Gift of God."

As you can see in reading this account, the name when first viewed is like the mathematical term "sine", in Latin "See nay", or more commonly "Sign", as Sine/Cosign.

With all this happening at once, we were distracted momentarily. However, we then were aware that she was staring directly at us, and she then said, "I am everything, and the world will know me."

At this point, I became more aware of the nature of the dream, and whereas earlier the dream had populated its own landscape effortlessly, now it began to show signs of mechanical traction, and to lose its spontaneity. There was something about triangles, with the sine/cosine affectation, and the girl's presence perhaps reflecting two other similar instances in other parts of the world, and the power and mission that was manifest in their births.

Now awake, I sat on the edge of the bed a moment, before going to the window and looking out on a sky that turned in dark red coils above a landscape heaving with desperate people, moaning and calling to each other across a black waste of continents.

Still, the nature of dreams is one of reality cloaked in subconscious projections and dramatic, somehow plausible fictions. To sleep and to dream, to waken and yet not, and then now, here, and wherever this is.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 36

Captain Blood Returns

Exile is its own season, reasons raining

invisibly for the traveler:

gentle and true, a sad song’s pining.

Joined in remembering his love to you,

rivers and the wind author caves from the rock,

the patterns of earth and images of heaven

determining the movement of energy through time.

With the strength read in tortoise shells,

leaves, and shapes of air,

the dwellings open into green bamboo,

into cane and the tall reed.

Such lodestars render worlds familiar,

as though light were a fever forever breaking,

and the slow wick these paragraphs allow

were time enough for moons and shadows quartering.

But the sun’s wheels are spoked with days,

and fields of force around the poles

make hostages of sea and continent alike—

the moon-tug of tides manifest in the pulse,

a theorem of salt walking upright on the land.

But observe, you are put to stern choice, to save

in making slave of the creature, or a man of him.

The dust of the road marking limits of his journey,

consider him human, confessed of new scenarios

between the edge of metal and the smooth jade,

or have the stones of Venice more in common with the clouds

than with the sea’s lit foam,

the plasma of ancient stars, or unfamiliar moons

ajar in other doorways?

There were summer evenings then, late evening sunlight

as supple as a boa round a bough.

Motionless at the window bay, a figure in white

stared beyond the empty street,

raising her attention, her watching’s ghost,

slowly and at last to the man across the way,

tending flowers in the early dark,

the singing and the soil beneath the nail:

root labours, as simple as a burning book

or the warm, clear nights

with moonlight and the lovers walking, naming stars

with names that made the night familiar—

the sky pieced over, within and through—

a sudden genealogy of light and shadow,

a leaf-like insistence

larger now than thunder in the wind.

As allegories and the world occasion

(dead stars devouring the definition of the day),

for an idiot of God the times grew fierce and fatal,

and summer snagged like a broken kite

in the bare reaches of November’s trees,

until he could neither go nor stay,

finding advantage neither in living

nor in death, and so departed

naked and starving along the way in winter,

courting cross-roads to find a remedy for love.

Approach is everything,

perceived in fire and the withered tree,

an inferred complicity of signs,

as lives gathered to their fathers

vie mutually with a sky

gathering to an early snow.

Mistake a sea tale

for the blue of any taller story,

and the world assumes an orbit more peculiar,

an aspect more particular

than idioms the observer had intended;

or after undue stress upon the direful

will the world come round to meet him after all?

So much for allegories…

commanding neither loyalty nor love

beyond the subterfuge of pi approximations,

as courage, resource, and invention

demand strokes bolder than liege codes

or handshakes with a mirror.

At Port Royal, between the here and hereafter,

a matter of tenses come and gone,

the fort otherwise to starboard,

while astern and larboard rode, unbroken,

mast lines of the Jamaica squadron,

the privateer lounged on sailcloth and cane,

a quarter-deck improvisation

meant neither for sudden death nor siege

nor any stallion-mare antithesis,

but for fate that is windward with the islands:

to reach up, and with a bell rope

pull down the sky

from the Tortugas to Haiti in the south,

dreaming a dream of guests and prisoners,

a calf-bound copy of Horace’s Odes

neglected in his hands.

When story lines have burned away

and time no longer canyons through the palm,

and by the energy the hand was image of,

we return to sources,

the dark earth flared green with shoots

and ruined orchards exploding in the spring,

we remember the idea of ourselves as motion,

a dream song floating through the haze,

abiding in a question, in a run of luck

or the faith we inhabit, outnumbered,

a way of saying where the weather went to,

where the star swallowing itself whole

went to, as a falcon lifts from a king’s hand:

a jewel at the king’s wrist

like a late entry in the book of hours,

rising to single-out the sky.

Ideas abide, the patterns expressly human:

verb enough to live by,

a fossil fisting into diamonds,

and though the axis of the planet angles as it must,

and galaxies existing only in equations

red-shift into an infinite interrogative,

the lute work of compasses at magnetic north

presents itself as a warm familiar, a nickname

for worlds referred to as our own.

Let the physician heal himself,

and with that laying-on of hands

mellow into medicine as sweet as orris root,

else dream, and have done with plagues

and parliaments, and the crush of sea miles

like cutlass strokes across the bow.

When whores of the old dominion

would sing High Mass for less, taken for a song,

content to describe what phenomena should elicit,

what fee, then, for the physician who heals his own?

In the power of his hand,

the power of warships swung starboard to starboard

within range of grapnels, within a gauze of burning sail

the Arabella listing, stern to bow now balsa for the guns,

Blood’s men boarding the ship of France

as patterns of climax alone allow,

from the deck of the captured vessel

watching his own ship rock and settle,

masts released to water, his own face

anonymous with wounds, and the weeping

as nameless as his own:

he breathes mirrors… the woman at the oriel

burning slowly into view, as a cycle

of winter and wandering burns towards equinox

and heals him home.

In lattices of degree,

distance supplants a king’s commission,

the buccaneer equal to three soldiers of the line,

prevails or perishes combating the aphasia

common to those latitudes.

He speaks his reasons clearly now, neither lost between

the letter and the meaning of places pure and unpeopled,

nor as a reality reduced to forms,

rather, of the world of myth as a turning construct,

a transformation syntax in the literature of recovery.

A sane man and searching, drifting back

from places he remembers he will never know,

consider him human, as plausible as rain

and what he has survived to be: unknown,

and remembering for himself alone the banyan life

whose tallest branch tip is root as well.

For though it was cold, and cold

to the ends of patience, the world

singing from its own soil

mends.