Vincent Spina: Multitude

And it is perceived again as something that never paused…

–John Ashbery

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And little by little
the little boy throws back to sea the sea-
grass that waves have pencil-lined
along the shore

while his sister, littler still,
sits in the wake of ripples
breaking at the shoreline, picks up
and holds pebbles and fragments of shells
to the sun, then casts them back to the sea,

one comes to realize a certain wisdom
entangled in the afternoon. Not of mind.
But of bone, the tendons, and beyond
—cells that once freely floated in seas
of first starts and stops line up to pulse
in the fiber of muscle, line the walls
of arteries and veins, become the drummers
of the drumbeat of the heart

—the way a universe of potential
without form or matter is pressed
into photons igniting the first light:
space born, where nothing is meant.
But occurs: restlessness of energy,
attraction of matter to matter.

And she, the little girl, and he, her brother
—just one, maybe two years older—have no clue
to what the multitude of their bodies knows:
wisdom of trial, of form in the chaos
—how the random breaking of waves
leaves an undulating pathway in the sand.

And now—as if nothing and forever—
they simply run off to embrace
waiting parents. And momentarily
the four are fixed by sunset
in a moment
of great celebration.

Copyright 2018 Vincent Spina

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