The Wave Hennets: Philosophical

THE WAVES' ILLUSION

As a wave sidles slyly through space and time.
what it's made of is left behind. Look there
at its confidence trick, ironical rhyme,
mocking that copy for being a model
of a pure imitation, till you could swear
only this moment is the original,
that this instant of sceptical glittering
isn't illusion, but no sooner do you
think that gravity's steadied it, it's grinning,
crazily sparkling, in a place somewhere new:
so the best thing to do is join in the game,
for unless it has changed, it can't be the same.

THE WAVE AND THE CIRCLE

You can see that a wave is doing its best,
all things considered, to become a circle.
It's becoming for circles, though they protest
waves never meet their insistence upon a
perfect closure. Circumference is single,
bounded, and endless: it's a circle's honour
to be One for eternity and nothing
else. It's a circle's duty to have no time
for a curve any different from its curving
into its curve forever. But a wave's mime
of a circle is really never-ending,
though the circles would say it's 'let's-pretending'.

HERACLITEAN FLAME

Running through all the shape of the flame is fire,
union incandescent that flees as soon
as complete, in a swoop uplifted, desire
racing from wick into smoke, but -- as a wave
through whose being travels water, a dune
sifting its sand over sand, bringing concave
to convex, or that cloud curved over the peak
through which the wind is a dolphin, transparent
to opaque to transparent, rainbow unique
whichever pair of eyes sees it, firmament
of the rain -- this wild Heraclitean flame
must still strive to be final, always the same.

THE HINDU WHIRLING THE TORCH

There's a man in the dark, says the Hindu, and
grasped in his outstretched hand a torch. This he whirls
round as fast as he can. From where you stand,
lo! -- it's a circle of uninterrupted fire.
What to him is a point of light here unfurls,
spiralling wave-like through time, an entire
and convincing existent, perfectly real.
There at your wrist your pulse; there behind your eyes
all those myriad rhythms of nerve you feel
nothing of, though you think with them. Atomize
every cell -- Go down humbly still farther in
where humanity vanishes into spin.

COINCIDENTIA OPPOSITORUM

'Each tucked string tells,' he said, and out of that proved
selfhood God-given, the One-in-the-Unique
winging back to One-as-the-Same. It moved
strictly to law that string, Pythagorean
in its mathematizing, equally Greek
holding its tone in a pure Heraclitean
hate of all repetition. How it pulsed free,
singing as no one ever had sung in time
or eternity, always perfectly Me,
yet just as perfectly Him in a sublime
coincidentia oppositorum!
(As long as the music's played in the forum!)

ETERNAL RETURN RETURNS

Every crest comes to long for its opposite,
toppling in hope for a depth that goes as far
as it rose. Every valley had its summit.
Boomerangs spin like ballet-dancers right back
to beginnings. On the roundabout a toy car
motionless takes the child a dangerous track
right away from its mother in order to reach
safety beside her, an endless peek-a-boo.
And a top leaning in, its nib scribbling each
doodle again and again in curlicue
arabesque. And in outer space the stars burn
in the spirals, though light-years from their return.

SYSTOLE AND DIASTOLE

It is stronger the more it goes back and forth,
up and then down, dark and then bright, transparent
and opaque. Sailing southern waters needs north
plain on the compass. It's an absence of storm
we call calm. And this great wave's greatness isn't
measured without the erasure of its form
in that furrow. With no bowing back downward,
where is a crest? With no climbing up higher,
what's the point of a rest? It has ventured
to the most vacant concavity, aspire
it then may to a convex extravagance
it can squander in lavish luxuriance.

SHOCK WAVES

It's the trouble with waves. They flop down when you
least expect them and leave you to drop. You drop
as resignedly as you must only to
be, in full collapse, slapped back upward. They slide
you to this side till your momentum can't stop
and then flood you with demands for the other side.
Even climaxes topple and troughs are drowned.
Ask for ice? You'll find cracks develop, floes snap
to be healed to be snapped; sharp edges are ground
into splinters; an opening is a trap
where the waves still break through. It you're on a ship
and you can't swim, you must suffer lift and dip.

'RECULER POUR MIEUX SAUTER'

There's the adage 'Reculer pour mieux sauter',
but you can always cap a proverb: 'A tide
in the affairs of men is taken,' they say,
'at the flood.' Yet they're both about waves. The mass
of a wheel has to turn round to every side
so as to build up its speed. So as to pass
over harbour walls, oceans recoil as low.
1066 was won by a false retreat.
Rhetoricians who wish to persuade us know
well that to win your opponent you must meet
his true wish for the future: you alone
can reveal it and show that it is your own.