Robin Hamilton
FIVE CARDS DEALT FROM TODAY'S DECK
Card 1: The Knight of Cups and the Princess of the Web
OR/ a meditation on strange attractors, and particles with
charm
What was the cat called, and whose kittens were they anyway?
Give me the answer to the Universe, if you can call that one!
Long way past those maybes till we finally hit down here,
And many strangenesses make up a Web where opposites repel.
Sweet my strange attractor, anomalous in my reality,
It's the good life for your devoted quark, well beyond his
Expected span, though short to others' eyes. Me here now,
The last in a line of flip-flops, where every fork was flip.
. I ran fast and hard and spun the glass faster and harder, and
the walls of the maelstrom edged closer at an exponential rate -
spread-eagled on a mobius strip, inescapable fly-paper .
And so, my Emma, now at last the words come clear,
As no way would I ever dull your sweet reality -
Angel exampling our hope that not all the bright girls
Must be destroyed, that somewhere there's a world when
The phone rings, someone picks it up and speaks to Marilyn,
Where the au pair comes back in time and calls an ambulance,
Where Janis puts the needle down, and turns back to life.
Not romantic nor sentimental because sometimes, not often, the good
May win, and where there's life I'll be by your side.
Card 2: Skinner's Killing-Ground
Never as easy as when you use absolutes, but
I never could - always tentative, the provisional
Gesture and the contingent word. The one I can-
Not say to you however often I say it about you
To others, forbidden sign to some
Strange significance that means so seriously.
I'm on holiday here in my life till time resumes,
As Newton rules my mother's blood and her planet
Trajectories towards death. Your world to me is
More subtle, a finer mesh where the cat can
Sit in the box and wait for her love to come.
Through the wall stalks that ginger tom we all
Believe exists, but pimpernel-smart can never
Be pinned down. There's no cryogenic killing jar
To be clapped over his head, a born survivor.
And as the reborn kittens walk one by one out
Of the door that is still unopened, neither cat
Lapping cream nor smithereened moggy is the answer.
Maybe there's a ghost who holds each photon in either hand,
And laughs and dices and is mad and always has been.
Card 3: Entropy Waltz
It took me a time but I finally came to it
Where I'd write poems which always said you
And meant it -
pensioned off Jack-and-Jill public
And didn't care but for my one audience.
And although there were admiring gasps
From some who overheard, that wasn't the point.
We danced our curious minuet for each other
Even though across our shoulders we watched
Alien eyes meet ours, but could never know
What each saw unless the other told our loves.
Count down the coin of honesty and what's withheld
is small change, loose gossip dropped in the charity-box:
There was a world elsewhere, but we ignored it
and it ignored us for a time, until our tune ended.
Card 4: Waiting For Schrodinger
Waiting for the door to open sometime ahead,
I pass my time in limbo flirting with the damned
And the occasional angel down here on a visit.
Card 5: Heat-Death of the Day
Draw an ending, dearest, underneath our colloquy:
Go sleep, and dream your peaceful dreams of some
Favoured might-have-been where the past changes,
Your prince didn't morph into a frog, marry
The blonde; where there's no rebel angel
To complicate your story, husband and lover
Merged in a single figure - some world that never
Can or should be, and that you'd hate if it were.
POSTSCRIPT
Where did the kittens come from anyway? Well, there was the day when Godel'
s tom - the one who was true but not derivable from the postulates of the
system - walked through a wall as he naturally could, and the inevitable
happened .
