DNA

Carved into the bark
a four letter alphabet
A C G T Spells............Life.

Panta Rhei – Everything Streams

The impossibility of repetition

Everything streams
yet everything seems infinitely divisible.
Sunshine beams outside
light scatters through trees and fallen leaves.

Step into the stream.
Particles teem in shoals, weave in flux and pass, until
in rain they fall again
where change leaves nothing the same.

Light scatters through trees and fallen leaves.
Sunshine beams outside.
Everything seems infinitely divisible;
yet everything streams.

Catching Waves

“The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but when I think of the fine known gradations, my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder.”
Charles Darwin

Stand anywhere.
Take a slice thinner than a human hair
Are there pictures passing through the air?

To catch light on a film of silver salts;
boil animal hides to gelatine,
spread a thousandth thick on celluloid,
turn black to white from red blue green,
from white to black and back again.
Stand anywhere. Catch the light
as pictures passing through the air.

Or to catch a wave - electromagnetic
and visible to the eye - align an array
of ten million solar cells,
turn red blue green into something or nothing;
(binary bits and bytes per pixel),
colours to numbers and back again.
Caught on the end of a human hair,
are there pictures passing through the air?

Or conquer a cold shudder and
take advantage of a long line
of slight successive variations
advanced by the shortest and slowest steps
in numerous gradations towards an organ
of extreme perfection and complication.
Did nature once make a nerve sensitive to light?

Stand anywhere.
Take one hundred and sixty million spliced human hairs;
are there pictures passing through the air?

*The majority of the final verse is an arrangement of Darwin’s own words in The Origin of Species and from a letter to a colleague

Time Pressing

I pick a pebble from the waterline;
cut through with its stripe of quartz it catches my eye.
Wetness picks out the black
and light glints the silica stippled in the sun.
If it were a fish it would be glistening;
it would gasp for water and slip from my grasp
quicker than I could catch a grab at it.

Not a million miles from here but in a million years
it has traced an existence,
pressed from previous sedimentary incarnations:
Ground, weathered, stirred in spate,
settled in calmer waters to fall and lie
with grains of common size and mass,
overlain by successive pressings.

Then forced up to be torn and cracked
fractured and beaten, bouldered, smashed and frosted,
split, baked and chipped off the block to be
tossed, jostled, smoothed round and graded, until
flipped flat at my feet it catches my eye,
cut through with its stripe of quartz:
for the first time subject to desire.

My want to possess is weighed for once
in the light of mindfulness.
Out of its element, dead in my hand,
is the power to suspend geological time.
Human time, though insignificant, has no respect
for the greater achievement that the grinding cycle of ages
has the dumb patience to achieve;

I place the stone as near to where I found it.
Gathered by the backwash,
waves gives gravity to the gesture.
Not having long to linger
I turned from the pull of the sea
and pressed for time
I left.

Anthropogenesis

The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
Thomas Hardy - Lines on the loss of the Titanic.

With the first kick of boot onto spade
The worm shrinks back.
Epoch,
Era,
Eon.
Nature counts sedimentary time.
Holocene,
Pleistocene,
Pliocene.
Uranium beats half-life to lead
Ceno,
Meso,
Palaeozoic,
Taking the time it takes
Devonian,
Silurian,
Ordovician.
The pendulum keeps deep time.
Cambrian,
Pre-Cambrian,
Proterozoic.
And the sea-worm crawls
Slimed, dumb, indifferent
Up from the swing of blind inertia.
Archean,
Palaeo,
Mesozoic
Eon, Era, Epoch
Neogene, Holocene, Human
Human Human.
Post-Human.

For The Record

There can be no fine fossil record
but, caught in amber, two drops of blood,
with spider and web reveal, gene by gene,
eon by eon, sperm to egg
generation by generation,
five hundred million years of successful
replication; hour by hour, error
by error; the accurate attachment, thread
by thread; faithfully treading lines of code
with practice of no forethought or hindsight
but weaving a web that spreads
from little bits of clay
to radiate around the world today.

Its left and right sides are two thirds as long
as it’s top and bottom sides and the
left side is located where a line drawn
from a point halfway between the midpoint
of the top side of the square is crossed by
two lines, the first of which is drawn from
a point halfway between the midpoint of
the left side and the upper left corner
to a point halfway between the point
halfway between the centre of the square...

The thought is seeded, streaming, crystal, in
one hundred billion supersaturated cells.
And so the artist conceives of a work that uses
idea as the object. Neither geometric
nor organic; seen by the blind and passed
from host to host by any temporary means.
Expressed with high fidelity, projected
transparent on an uneven wall or
played-out like the accelerated evolution
of jazz, spun and caught on record,
remastered, analog to digital; passing
the old grey whistle test of hook-line
and finally the test of time that, though unfaithfully
falling onto fertile minds, outlives the liver’s longevity.

Italics:
Instructions for a wall drawing ,The Location of a Square, by Sol Lewitt. John Weber Gallery New York. Exhibition 1974.
Lewitt said “Ideas can be works of art” and coined the term Conceptual Art.

Get Out Of That Without Moving

There will be a time and a place
in time and in space
when and where we will not be.

Some time
after the big bang,
I coalesced and my time began;
measured in events.

Since that singular beginning
I have traced a vector, spiraling like swarf;
tracking away from the point of conception;

treading the globe;
spinning with the days;
tilting with the seasons;
circling the sun;
spiraling with the galaxy
and all moving away
from the universal singularity.

There will be
a time and a place
in time and in space
when and where
we will not be.