You'd think he came to the shore to watch a ginger-haired dog,
sprawled like a wrung-out towel left by a beachgoer in haste,
staring into horizon blurred by thickening fog,
hearing repetitive lament of rocks being ground by waves?
No. His reason for coming was as blatant as that
of a tough who says he picks fights, because he just likes to fight.
That the doggy was gingering the monochrome of the sand
is far from being the point. Simply put, never mind.
The point is this: he just needed a cubic meter of air
to sniff in many a molecule from the arbitrary cube.
Chiefly, he craved those of oxygen, and, just to be fair,
the dog was oxygenating its blood circuitry, too.
But that was just the beginning—he wondered what would come next,
when his aerial chalice drained itself to the lees:
he'd heard of the airless void as a bottomless nest
of other provisional "particles", quote, unquote, and as is.
Yet, if only those quanta could trickle down his throat,
the ladles still poured out some extra, like a hearty gravity's soup.
And after, they lavishly offered some time and space for dessert.
Was that the end of all? Bite it! It was an infinite loop.
I can't really say where exactly all that infinity ceased,
but, all of a sudden, an impulse emerged in him, picking its way—
through all his quarks—to pet the ginger-coated beast,
which sensed it through all its quanta, its tail thumping the gray
sand of the beach.