Where Is the Wave?

The wave forms, moves towards land, grows, breaks,
spills up the beach. So, too, a human life.
And then the wave is gone;
the water washes back down the beach.
The water’s there, but where’s the wave?
There is no wave.
And are humans no more than a wave,
a construct of thought and memory and processing
in an ever-changing assemblage of matter?
And when the wave has broken, though the atoms
are still there, is there no longer a wave?
What did the wave, as a wave, contribute
to the universe, to the assemblage
of information, to the growth of intelligence?
It pushed, it changed, it rearranged...
But then... the atoms are still there,
but where’s the wave?
We live with the immediacy of the sea.