The Chemistry Lesson
The Web of God
Echoes of Eckhart
Lacking the Latin
Invocations

from 'Leaping & Staggering'

The Chemistry Lesson

Our benches were maps of unknown worlds:
sprawling continents of chromic stains,
oceans shaped by acid splashes.
Swan-necked taps arose as gods,
cabbalistic glassware crammed the cupboards.

The retort was always my favourite piece:
clamped to its stand, a Bunsen flame licking
its bulbous buttock, a lethal concoction
seething within, an oily distillate
trickling down its Pinocchio nose.

Experiments designed to demonstrate
the basic laws would often prove
the opposite: mass was not conserved,
valences were rarely simple integers,
composition never constant.

Our written work was full of faked results,
Q.E.D.'s unjustified by data,
diagrams of over-perfect apparatus
equations copied out of books:
the tidy world of what-should-be.

In later life, I tried to falsify
a love-affair, make it fit
the theory of eternal happiness. She left,
and thus confirmed the old dichotomy
between a theory and a fact.


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from 'In The Stillness'

The Web of God
No-one can separate himself from anyone else - Julian of Norwich

The Father's love creates for us
a unity, a web connecting
each with each,

that shimmers in the Spirit's breath,
and sparkles in the glory
of the Son

Wherever may the Lord so choose
to touch the web, he touches
each of us.

Thus does the mighty reparation
Christ achieved vibrate through
everything.

Thereby each soul receives and shares
the certain hope of union
with God.


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from 'Echoes of Eckhart'

Happy Birthday!
Says God
Hope you like the
Gift.

Unwrapping it
Meister Eckhart finds
Eternity
In the present.

Meister Eckhart sits
Contemplating
God.

A beggar approaches
Contemplating
Soup.

Meister Eckhart stops
Contemplating
God.

Confronted by a
Pile of paperwork
Meister Eckhart groans

Where is God
When you need him?

Right here
Says a muffled voice
From the middle of the pile.

God
Has gone missing?

You
Wish to find him?

Then you should seek him
Says Meister Eckhart

Where you last left him

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from 'The Logic of Whistling'

Lacking the Latin
I've never attempted to achieve my potential - Peter Cook

A cap, a mac, a monotone were all
That you required to make us cry with laughter:
Ignoramus Pete, a pompous judge,
Wisty with his Interesting Facts,
Sir Arthur teaching ravens how to fly
In water, a foul-mouthed yob, a leaping nun.

Would-be copycats appeared, but none
Remotely had your speed of wit and all
Of us agreed, whenever you let fly
Another shaft, that in creating laughter
You were supreme. The outcome of these facts?
Success for life, as far as we could judge.

But we admirers soon became you judge
And jury. We wanted more and more. When none
Or very little came, and when the facts
Emerged of private grief - the booze, the all-
Too-common family rows, divorce - our laughter
Waned. Had Cookie been too smart, too fly?

A comic Icarus who'd tried to fly
Beyond himself? A genius who couldn't judge
The real range of his potential laughter?
We shook our heads, drank beer, discussed how none
Of us, had we your gifts, would let it all
Disintegrate... A waste... But facts are facts...

Yet when we come at last to face the facts
Of our own lives, of how we've let time fly
Pursuing gross fatuities and all
The trivia our better selves would judge
To be as batty as your leaping nun,
Your best response will be sardonic laughter.

Perhaps we too should now dismiss with laughter
Attempts to claim as scientific facts
Alleged potentials. What if we have none?
Or no more than a donkey or a fly?
Your miner, who aspired to be a judge
Had he the Latin, answers for us all.

Laughter is just laughter. A fly's a fly.
There are no other facts by which to judge
Our lives, or those of others. None at all.

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from 'Invocations'

O DNA
spring of life, coiled for life,
cell-centre's delicate thread
untwisting, re-twisting,
spiralling down through generations;
you are the code of our being:
come, coil in our soul-centre,
transcribe yourself in the nucleus of our will.

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