Background Noise

"We live in an ocean of whispers left over from our eruptive creation"

Tommy Lynch had a pigeon loft out back;
the birds wheeled around the roofs in close formation.
On my dove-soft pillow, almost awake,
I'd hear their wing beats' periodic motion.

You could listen then: the pigeons flew
in slow circles; the clouds paused in sleepy skies;
soft roostings carried down the chimney flue,
sounding the quiet lounge with trills and coos.

I think of The Horn Antenna at Bell Laboratories
with Penzias and Wilson groping like earwigs,
invading the giant ear's inner arteries
to scour pigeon droppings and nested twigs.

They had a job to do - listening for radio waves;
engineered their 20-foot horn, to scan the azimuth,
to hear the heavens whisper. The giant ear receives
the faintest far-off radiation with mammoth

funnel, rotating on its axis to trace an elevation.
And in my day-job too, days are accretions;
I model and apply with equal concentration;
and, like them, suffer strange detections:

a background interference, unexplained,
some unknown, unknowable aftermath
behind everything, persistent, un-planned,
that resurrects and redefines its powerful myth.

Anstey -

Alan, I really enjoyed this. I'll be back. But I wanted you to know -- first thing, appreciation. The first two stanzas especially just grabbed me.

Leanne -

Nice, subtle rhymes and loose rhythms give this a very accessible feel, which softens the technical nature of the subject (just as the reference to pillows does in the first stanza).

It's interesting that the more credence we give to myths and bizarre theories (hello Professor Einstein), the more remarkable answers we find. Without that amazing human capacity to imagine, the science would have nothing to prove. (Although sometimes the imagination is rather ill-placed, like the people who committed suicide the day the Large Hadron Collider went online in case the universe ended and everyone died. Clearly not science people )

What a wonderful situation Penzias and Wilson found themselves in -- and yet, their discovery itself is not much more than (or even as much as) background noise to the billions of people going about their daily lives in complete ignorance. Every minute of every day we encounter the echoes of great achievements and advances, and most of them are filtered out. As poets (and obviously, in other -- real -- professions) we collect echoes and try to make them heard. At the end of the day, maybe we're not much more than antennae. I'm strangely ok with that.

U668857 -

Many thanks for comments ...

I definitely wanted to use the whole narrative of the discovery of cosmic radiation left over from the "big bang" as a metaphor...I'm not sure how Tommy and the pigeons got in here...but I suspect it's something to do with the act of listening, of being able to hear (really hear) that's bound up with the past too and all associations of the past (all myths, and ideas that you could attune to before the drudgery of day-to-day living sublimates that inner ear..)...I guess the "unknowable aftermath/ behind everything" can be several things...my metaphoric cosmic radiation is the unheard background of Love, God, Meaning, Childhood...but mostly the ideas of Love and God that get surprisingly rediscovered when we listen (stop and really allow ourselves to listen) and realize it was always there in the background despite our failure to register under the din of daily occupation....Rgds.,Alan.