潮目　Shiome

A hundred jellyfish are scattered through the water.

Each contracts its bell on its own beat.
With every contraction the rim of the bell ripples.
The nine tentacles swing late, each at a different time.

That beat matches neither its neighbour's nor any other's.
In twenty seconds, the hundred beats never once line up.

The jellyfish do not look at each other. They do not touch.
What they share is only the water that carries them.

The water has places that gather and places that scatter.
Those places move, so the thick parts and the thin parts move with them.

What is schooling is the water.

Reduce the points and each bell breaks up first.
What remains is only the arrangement of thick and thin.
The shape of the swarm was never inside any one of them.

At forty points that arrangement can no longer be read.
At one, what is left is the path of a point that was the rim of one bell,
contracting and extending as it is carried along.

Take away what gathers them, and no swarm remains.