To Wittgenstein Poem by Rob Dyer

To Wittgenstein, Oxford,1957

Words stir and patterns coil at your hard saying;
thought, piercing the shapeless clay of memory's dug sites,
finds no error, sees only the subtle thread of circles
whistling round the untellable heart of notion.
But will men say the world's the residue of your perpetual Fall?
Or will he honour me on flat earth, dappled and tall?

Words more spectral than your bare, white rock
that lies open to a cloudless sky in eroded, desert places
catch the eye with a sheerer beauty than you could devise.
Not at the sun always man's fading eye can look, but sees
in the kingfisher, the wood pigeon, the robin, in flight,
all that his fragmented mind can understand of light.

'A word has meaning only in the possibility of reference.'
Oh, man - did you not see through your prism of stones? -
is a word singing for breath in a valley of bones,
Christ the logos in Gethsemane seeking death's dark sentence.
A proposition arrows through the wind to the point of a name;
this alone is fulfilment, the aspiring word written in fame.

World god-loins forth not in created stuff but in movement -
for so Rutherford, slashing through the Lucretian myth,
found in the atom's secret womb Heraclitus' logic fire.
Yet I sing man who cannot see substance white and rapid as wind.
Poetry dallies hand in hand with the coloured forms of things
and flies shot at its nominal truth on its own arrow wings.