1.

With my visible eyes, jazz fans,
I can see visible things.
The stars are flowers,
white and yellow and steely blue
against the black sky.

With my ultraviolet eyes
I can see secrets:
the ultraviolet markings on pale petals
that only bees are meant to see
and in the sky hotter, younger stars
against the black sky.

With my radio eyes
I can see radio galaxies blooming,
with my gamma ray eyes,
gamma ray bursters bursting,
always always against the black sky.

But with my microwave eyes
there is a background,
the sky is dark grey,
dark grey with ripples,
the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation,
the distended remnant of the first light.

2.

There was an original catastrophe,
a Big Bang, an anti-mystical moment
when all ceased to be one
and disgrace fell across the sky.

And so there was an exploding broken mess,
ringing with sound waves,
with compressions and rarefactions,
dense then rare, dense then rare,
in the primeval plasma.

But then there was a second great moment,
the Recombination when the fragments of everything
cooled enough to make something.
They coalesced into the first atoms,
all at once and at that instant
they released a single exultant flash of light –

the Background Radiation, a flash photo
of those ancient compressions,
still fading and therefore still visible.

And the compressions became the galaxies,
the rarefactions became the terrifying voids between them
and so it was that the sound waves of the Big Bang
sang all the worlds into shape.

3.

And we can do the same tonight, jazz fans,
because the ripples had ripples within them,
overtones and resonances,
like the tubes inside Bix's trumpet.

It wasn't a Bang, it was a chord
and I've looked into the rapidly expanding field
of cosmic acoustics, I've examined the graph
showing amplitude against wavelength for the ripples,
which is a kind of score
showing how many of you
need sing each wavelength, each note.

I've even sent out the press release:
Big Bang To Be Re-Staged In Stoke Newington This Thursday. Admittedly it'll be about a hundred octaves too high
but that's jazz.

You people round the tables,
you're that basic frequency,
and you roguish looking gentlemen by the bar,
you're the first overtone.
And you people hung back by the sound desk,
you're the next one.
And you, madam, yes and your friend,
you're the fourth,
filling the air with sound,
dense then rare, dense then rare.

Individually first. Yes, it's good,
so altogether now: Om.
The star are flowers.
The Universe lights up tonight.

© 2007