Of Beauty and Science

Ever since nothing
Will open a hole
In the universe

Stirring gravity
Into this, making
Nothing much of it,

Waves have been building—
Waves have become us,
And the thing with waves,

None are singular—
There’s never a break;
There’s always a peak,



A trough, the next wave—
So no wave can be
Purely chaotic—

Consequently—we
Children of waves, waves
Ourselves, nothing much,

Understand beauty
As repetition
Among intervals

And negotiate
By various ways
We feel timeliness,



Shi, in the changes,
Patterns as a weave,
Shifts in all cycles,

And then measure this
By imagining
Waves can be counted,

We can count what can’t
Ever be present
And accounted for—

Accounts, our meanings
Stirred through waves to go
With their gravity,



Thus making our own
Beauty as knowing—
That which can be made

And lost but never
Regained as it was—
Although we quarrel

And are small—although
We surge, seize, and break,
Want and are lonely—

We are scientists
Of waves’ timeliness,
These whole lives at sea.