The two parts of this poem were each meant to be 96 lines but I muddled the line count of Part II and it came out at 100 lines.
There was a lot of media interest in 2014 when NASA succeeded in putting a lander on the snappily-named comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The pictures the lander sent back before ‘dying’ struck me as extraordinary in showing that the physical forces at work on its landscape were precisely the same as those on earth. This led me to think and ‘The Comet’ was the result.
The poem is in blank verse, the first four lines of each part rhyme ABAB and this is repeated at the end of the part; alternate lines rhyme thereafter.
The psalm quotes at the beginning of each part are from Ps 18 v 1 and 7 (Douay-Rheims); Rough Tor (Part I lines 42 and 48) is pronounced “Rowtor”; Fred West (Part II line 27) was a particularly disgusting serial murderer.
-----------------
The Comet I
The heavens show forth the glory of God,
And the firmament declareth the work of His hands.
The Philae lander bounced from rock to clod
And grounded in a rough-toothed cleft with sands;
Crippled, it still caught images and fed
Them to the probe Rosetta standing off
The comet Sixty-Seven P which sped
In orbit, Sun to Jupiter, a sole
And frozen journeyer these millioned years.
Rosetta pulsed those images to earth,
And all at Probe Control high-fived with cheers;
At last, fire-breathing man, at great remove,
Had placed a foot on débris, solipsist
But earthlike, petrel of the solar winds.
And those tough handlers like the psalmodist
Could only sing then silence into awe
As Philae’s camera scanned the comet’s tracts,
Those cliffs, those screes, those boulder-squatted shelves,
All monochrome, though sunlit – bodied facts,
Bereft of growth, but otherwise like home!
Indeed, not luscious like the raw moraines
Of Alp or Himalaya, ever pocked
With grass or thrill-green moss – their small domains
Cowered from riotous winds or grasping ice;
Rather, the badlands, hinterlands, where eye
Might trek the strict horizons, dust to tufa
And void of plant, and feel inscapably
En-homed, despite all lack, for always present
Is natural form – those landscape starks and slopes,
The mouldings by excision and deposit,
Which, ur-familiar, become as tropes,
Beknown by instinct, us, and us of them.
Think, then, of Sixty-Seven P Churyúmov-
Gerásiménko: its drifts of dust and rubble
Clinched hard by ice, cracking to trench and cove,
Much cliffed and ledged, fractured in plates and shards;
Rotation, solar winds, bestitching patterns
Which whiplashed yards each comet day through slag,
And scattered boulder-drifts like drunken slatterns;
Those flats and inclines, caves and rugged ground,
Acquainted forms made spick in negative,
As if one stood on Bodmin’s Rough Tor, caught
In twilight on a pure-skyed day, alive
To every contour of its rock-thrown flank:
All, all, evince a sort of trustingness
So that what’s seen enlivens human ease.
And that must be: the forces, great or less,
Which fissured Rough Tor and Sixty-Seven P
Are one and same – expansion and compaction,
Full-flowed or torqued – on Bodmin, on the comet
Or any space-time point that’s under traction.
Their consequence in structure, mass and shape,
Be it in granules or the spin-flung whorl
Of deep-space galaxies, is intimate
To us, although their violence might appal.
And inheld by those forms which replicate
The switchback plein and clutter of the earth
We’d grow at one with all their one-toned strangeness.
And so, to step, protected, on the girth
Of Sixty-Seven P, in some part-sense,
Would be to land on home, the landscape ours.
That’s true, probe where you will among the heavens:
On Mars the NASA landers made their flowers
In desert dust and now tramp bouldered plains
Familiar as Arizona saltlands;
‘Insight’ has caught the “huff” of Mars’ blunt winds
Which blusters ears as if on Exmouth sands.
On Titan, methane lakes and seas amend
The shore to channels, islets, banks, and scour
Out shapings found on any Black Sea beach.
Again, Orion in its light-years bower
Arranges gas arms in a furious flow
Embodying the clashed and twisted stretchings
Of stormy mares tails or the gale-mad waters
Of Portland Race. The firmament is fetchings
Made structure by the glutinate of physics,
And cosmos-wide its laws are fiat’s fiat –
In quantum larks and chemistry, mechanics,
In flow dynamics, riot-large or quiet;
Hence, forms accrete on archetypes which press
And husband self’s epiphany; once known,
Internalised as autochthonic being,
By view or visit, spaceboot step or drone,
They’ll manifest, close-far, whichever zone
Of space-time’s woven sprawl man’s able to
Approach, for physics, bounded by its own
Self-constitution, limits form and hew,
And those man finds on earth he’ll find on moon,
Planet, comet; loiterer with good cheer
He’ll reconcile and denizen despite
All freaks of pressure, light or atmosphere.
For always pricking, a half-unsettled sense
Of unity with strangeness, like a nod,
Of oneness with the crotchet in space-strands,
Will urge wherever man at cost has trod
Is home, adjunct to this warm earth, its lands.
------------------
The Comet II
His going out is from the end of heaven,
And His circuit even to the end thereof.
So home it is. But standing on his haven
Light years from earth, the sky a brittle mauve,
The ice packed metres deep around the ports
Which gain the thermostatic chambers where
A pleasant summer’s day is lived in shorts,
Will man not find that every unsolved wrangle
Which scours the earth has hitched his space-tramp’s payloads
And now is cultured by the res which strives
To common on a planet? Homes and bodes,
All said, like Cham and Sem, have always vexed:
Convections of the hive, who’s up, who’s low,
Are sluggish-active; add the brutal spark
Of passion – a Francesca hot in throe,
Iago icy-seared to butcher trust –
And pride at once enclots, like gas-hags creeping
The shale and mesa surface, blindly apt
To throw the self-obsessing settler, reaping
The sowed, infecting with the Fall’s lament
The sinless frozen planet which he claims.
For pride proposes man co-equal pole
With all he feels and sees, the world which frames
His vaunt but doubt-besplit autonomy,
As prone to tumble as a man in space-walk,
Hence unredeemed (and quite how different from
A Stalin or Fred West?) And yet this gawk –
O Navigator! Engineer! – has but
To squint the tinctured clouding of the sky
And con the still-strange star clumps of his view
To fetch up short at questing’s question: Why?
Why something? What’s its meaning? What am I?
What’s final truth? What destiny is mine? –
Enigmas which like space suit mites have itched
Him from the earth. For these, ravine and chine,
Or folded plain, felt comfortings of form,
Can yield no help; but instant, body-close,
Atouch his chin, dabbling the brain-stuff of
His skull, a sensing, present-absent, grows
And goes, and is, but not, is there unseen,
Full-faced unseen, about unseen, behind,
A pressure which by fact reveals itself
As that which in its power innates like mind
The firmament – the travelled known as well
Those virgin tracts dim glimpsed by lens, all seamed
Through circuit’s end by that instanter fiat
Proposing physics as its Word, and memed.
This constant, like a murmur in the ears,
What is it but the solus fact of ‘Is?’
For there’s an ‘is’ of undoubt facts, those things
And protocols of matter, found by quiz,
But there’s an all-subsuming fact of ‘Is,’
Prior to all that’s fact, the ‘Is’ of ‘Is,’
Unqualified, sufficient, Its own ‘Is,’
By will creating, that by touch and kiss
It might approve the gases, rocks and winds
Throughout the cosmos, just as men those years
Ago delighted in the cliffs and screes, their first
Traverse of Sixty-Seven P. These flears
And prompts, inveiglings of the untouched Touch,
Will pose wherever conscious thought throughout
The universe, aware of self’s existing,
Takes root; therefore, on planets, moons, with clout
And shout, man wrestles with that call of strange
Election: chosen but in doubt of ends.
In point, what need had he to boot his way
To galaxies? That riddle which subtends
The truth – what is the just; how, then, to live? –
Cuts to the quick on earth as any moon;
But man the animal decamps his den
If food and safety die, and the bones strewn
Across the world announce catastrophe;
And man the rational was ever glad
To nose new habitats, his brain and hand skills
Outstripping moral niceness, halfway mad
To press the limits of the possible.
What’s to conclude? Comet or planet, man
Will home, parleying with the intimacy
Of forms, but pride – to the brain’s wheat, the bran –
Pollutes the moral law he plants by step
On sphere or toppling comet, sinning each
New world he claims his own, for matter to
Itself is pure. Meaning, inducting speech,
Self-proffers comprehension to restrain
This Fall, and incarnates in self-awareness,
Pointing in angst his moral agitations
Which gift significance, though men impress
Deceits, purging its worrisome demands
To grow to truth. This torpitude is pride –
The Liar’s dropsy. Racked to heat death, though,
Or crushed to black hole surds where none may bide,
The cosmos lacks its own sufficiency;
And man, of cosmos made, and therefore but
The cosmos thinking of itself, likewise
Is void of all foundation: both for strut
Dependent on the self-sufficient ‘Is.’
And both, like gaunt St Paul whose flesh-thorn leaven
Goaded in truth, are footloose till they cleave
In rest to what’s before all things, the Given,
That Being salving being: it is enough.
====================
© February – March 2019
And the firmament declareth the work of His hands.
The Philae lander bounced from rock to clod
And grounded in a rough-toothed cleft with sands;
Crippled, it still caught images and fed
Them to the probe Rosetta standing off
The comet Sixty-Seven P which sped
In orbit, Sun to Jupiter, a sole
And frozen journeyer these millioned years.
Rosetta pulsed those images to earth,
And all at Probe Control high-fived with cheers;
At last, fire-breathing man, at great remove,
Had placed a foot on débris, solipsist
But earthlike, petrel of the solar winds.
And those tough handlers like the psalmodist
Could only sing then silence into awe
As Philae’s camera scanned the comet’s tracts,
Those cliffs, those screes, those boulder-squatted shelves,
All monochrome, though sunlit – bodied facts,
Bereft of growth, but otherwise like home!
Indeed, not luscious like the raw moraines
Of Alp or Himalaya, ever pocked
With grass or thrill-green moss – their small domains
Cowered from riotous winds or grasping ice;
Rather, the badlands, hinterlands, where eye
Might trek the strict horizons, dust to tufa
And void of plant, and feel inscapably
En-homed, despite all lack, for always present
Is natural form – those landscape starks and slopes,
The mouldings by excision and deposit,
Which, ur-familiar, become as tropes,
Beknown by instinct, us, and us of them.
Think, then, of Sixty-Seven P Churyúmov-
Gerásiménko: its drifts of dust and rubble
Clinched hard by ice, cracking to trench and cove,
Much cliffed and ledged, fractured in plates and shards;
Rotation, solar winds, bestitching patterns
Which whiplashed yards each comet day through slag,
And scattered boulder-drifts like drunken slatterns;
Those flats and inclines, caves and rugged ground,
Acquainted forms made spick in negative,
As if one stood on Bodmin’s Rough Tor, caught
In twilight on a pure-skyed day, alive
To every contour of its rock-thrown flank:
All, all, evince a sort of trustingness
So that what’s seen enlivens human ease.
And that must be: the forces, great or less,
Which fissured Rough Tor and Sixty-Seven P
Are one and same – expansion and compaction,
Full-flowed or torqued – on Bodmin, on the comet
Or any space-time point that’s under traction.
Their consequence in structure, mass and shape,
Be it in granules or the spin-flung whorl
Of deep-space galaxies, is intimate
To us, although their violence might appal.
And inheld by those forms which replicate
The switchback plein and clutter of the earth
We’d grow at one with all their one-toned strangeness.
And so, to step, protected, on the girth
Of Sixty-Seven P, in some part-sense,
Would be to land on home, the landscape ours.
That’s true, probe where you will among the heavens:
On Mars the NASA landers made their flowers
In desert dust and now tramp bouldered plains
Familiar as Arizona saltlands;
‘Insight’ has caught the “huff” of Mars’ blunt winds
Which blusters ears as if on Exmouth sands.
On Titan, methane lakes and seas amend
The shore to channels, islets, banks, and scour
Out shapings found on any Black Sea beach.
Again, Orion in its light-years bower
Arranges gas arms in a furious flow
Embodying the clashed and twisted stretchings
Of stormy mares tails or the gale-mad waters
Of Portland Race. The firmament is fetchings
Made structure by the glutinate of physics,
And cosmos-wide its laws are fiat’s fiat –
In quantum larks and chemistry, mechanics,
In flow dynamics, riot-large or quiet;
Hence, forms accrete on archetypes which press
And husband self’s epiphany; once known,
Internalised as autochthonic being,
By view or visit, spaceboot step or drone,
They’ll manifest, close-far, whichever zone
Of space-time’s woven sprawl man’s able to
Approach, for physics, bounded by its own
Self-constitution, limits form and hew,
And those man finds on earth he’ll find on moon,
Planet, comet; loiterer with good cheer
He’ll reconcile and denizen despite
All freaks of pressure, light or atmosphere.
For always pricking, a half-unsettled sense
Of unity with strangeness, like a nod,
Of oneness with the crotchet in space-strands,
Will urge wherever man at cost has trod
Is home, adjunct to this warm earth, its lands.
------------------
The Comet II
His going out is from the end of heaven,
And His circuit even to the end thereof.
So home it is. But standing on his haven
Light years from earth, the sky a brittle mauve,
The ice packed metres deep around the ports
Which gain the thermostatic chambers where
A pleasant summer’s day is lived in shorts,
Will man not find that every unsolved wrangle
Which scours the earth has hitched his space-tramp’s payloads
And now is cultured by the res which strives
To common on a planet? Homes and bodes,
All said, like Cham and Sem, have always vexed:
Convections of the hive, who’s up, who’s low,
Are sluggish-active; add the brutal spark
Of passion – a Francesca hot in throe,
Iago icy-seared to butcher trust –
And pride at once enclots, like gas-hags creeping
The shale and mesa surface, blindly apt
To throw the self-obsessing settler, reaping
The sowed, infecting with the Fall’s lament
The sinless frozen planet which he claims.
For pride proposes man co-equal pole
With all he feels and sees, the world which frames
His vaunt but doubt-besplit autonomy,
As prone to tumble as a man in space-walk,
Hence unredeemed (and quite how different from
A Stalin or Fred West?) And yet this gawk –
O Navigator! Engineer! – has but
To squint the tinctured clouding of the sky
And con the still-strange star clumps of his view
To fetch up short at questing’s question: Why?
Why something? What’s its meaning? What am I?
What’s final truth? What destiny is mine? –
Enigmas which like space suit mites have itched
Him from the earth. For these, ravine and chine,
Or folded plain, felt comfortings of form,
Can yield no help; but instant, body-close,
Atouch his chin, dabbling the brain-stuff of
His skull, a sensing, present-absent, grows
And goes, and is, but not, is there unseen,
Full-faced unseen, about unseen, behind,
A pressure which by fact reveals itself
As that which in its power innates like mind
The firmament – the travelled known as well
Those virgin tracts dim glimpsed by lens, all seamed
Through circuit’s end by that instanter fiat
Proposing physics as its Word, and memed.
This constant, like a murmur in the ears,
What is it but the solus fact of ‘Is?’
For there’s an ‘is’ of undoubt facts, those things
And protocols of matter, found by quiz,
But there’s an all-subsuming fact of ‘Is,’
Prior to all that’s fact, the ‘Is’ of ‘Is,’
Unqualified, sufficient, Its own ‘Is,’
By will creating, that by touch and kiss
It might approve the gases, rocks and winds
Throughout the cosmos, just as men those years
Ago delighted in the cliffs and screes, their first
Traverse of Sixty-Seven P. These flears
And prompts, inveiglings of the untouched Touch,
Will pose wherever conscious thought throughout
The universe, aware of self’s existing,
Takes root; therefore, on planets, moons, with clout
And shout, man wrestles with that call of strange
Election: chosen but in doubt of ends.
In point, what need had he to boot his way
To galaxies? That riddle which subtends
The truth – what is the just; how, then, to live? –
Cuts to the quick on earth as any moon;
But man the animal decamps his den
If food and safety die, and the bones strewn
Across the world announce catastrophe;
And man the rational was ever glad
To nose new habitats, his brain and hand skills
Outstripping moral niceness, halfway mad
To press the limits of the possible.
What’s to conclude? Comet or planet, man
Will home, parleying with the intimacy
Of forms, but pride – to the brain’s wheat, the bran –
Pollutes the moral law he plants by step
On sphere or toppling comet, sinning each
New world he claims his own, for matter to
Itself is pure. Meaning, inducting speech,
Self-proffers comprehension to restrain
This Fall, and incarnates in self-awareness,
Pointing in angst his moral agitations
Which gift significance, though men impress
Deceits, purging its worrisome demands
To grow to truth. This torpitude is pride –
The Liar’s dropsy. Racked to heat death, though,
Or crushed to black hole surds where none may bide,
The cosmos lacks its own sufficiency;
And man, of cosmos made, and therefore but
The cosmos thinking of itself, likewise
Is void of all foundation: both for strut
Dependent on the self-sufficient ‘Is.’
And both, like gaunt St Paul whose flesh-thorn leaven
Goaded in truth, are footloose till they cleave
In rest to what’s before all things, the Given,
That Being salving being: it is enough.
====================
© February – March 2019
