Spaces

A consideration

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

Stuck between interstellar
and intracellular,
we inhabit spaces.

They make up much of our lives,
our bodies,
our universe.

Watch a World Cup football match:
the wide expanses of empty field,
long empty expanses, it sometimes seems, of time,

A superfluity of short, prosaic passes 
and long pauses,
and then, slashing across open space,

a bold attacking dash,
a sweeping pass,
a shot that bends through air and infinity

to land in the back of the net,
causing its netting to billow 
like a sailboat's rigging,

and the crowd to roar, in ecstasy or despair.

We make much of things, chores, duties, objects,
yet saints and sages often
come back to emptiness,

The silent realm between this and that,
Being and becoming,
Intent and action,

Cause, effect.

The charged space 
between a couple who can't get enough of each other,
and the deadened space between those who can.

Space between one thought and another,
One line of a poem and the next,
One breath and the one that follows.

Space between musical notes, steps, spoken words, deadlines, dreams.
The wait for a lover's phone call,
A baby's first word,

An apple to fall from the tree,
a peach to ripen,
a plot to thicken.

Waiting on a friend,
waiting in line or on line,
or just watching.

We can't imagine adequately the magnitudes 
of distance between stars
and galaxies 

That themselves are migrating in and through space.

Or the minute intervals 
within our bodies where tiny cellular agents
fulfill their tasks, unseen

And even smaller particles
spin and dart in subatomic arcs
through obscure miniverses of emptiness.

We argue, sometimes heatedly, over how much space
should come after the period that ends one sentence
before the next begins,

Proving again how easy it is to create
space that distances one human from another,
and how hard

to make the leap that connects.