Delocalized Waves

So many small changes are happening

Everywhere and all at once, including

All our efforts to chase down and count them

In hopes of predicting where they’ll be next.

They add up as we add them; they add up

Faster than we add them, as we are them.

A boater, bobbing on the waves, knows not

To try to count every last one of them.

Summing constrains equivalence, while waves

Surge, sink, and surge but can’t be fixed, unless

We pretend. And oh how we can pretend.

We were born for pretense and we get bored

Merely paying attention. One dead leaf

Shifts a handspan in a wave of the wind.

The rain falls, then dries, Radnóti noticed.

Consider the tiny agitations

Of the world. Waves can be combined in ways

That localized particles never can.