Delicately
Along the breast of shore,
Steps beget steps, syllables
Beget syllables,
Syllables of steps speak
One by one, slowly
Forging the long sentence
That shadows your journey.
As words disappear and
Are replaced by others,
The footsteps of your thoughts
Wander peripatetically behind you.
Inner words on the winds
Like seabirds and clouds
Punctuate the language of sky,
And so too your footsteps
Together with the wrack upon the shore
Write a language in the sands,
A living lexigraphy of things,
An orthography of time and vision
Integrating silence with meaning,
A soundless communication
Permeating all things.
You unite in conversation
With the deep blue
Of sky and ocean.
Your eyes receive word from the horizon.
You speak to everything with your eyes
And they to you.
It is a long question your gaze asks
To the jelly and star fishes
Washed up on the shoreAbout the nature of their existence,
Of what they briefly experienced,
About all the millions of years of evolution
Embodied in them, now dead.
And you move on,
Always moving on...
The crush of sand beneath your feet
Informs you, step by step, that
There are more stars
In the universe than grains of sand
In all the world,
And you argue that it's just not possible.
It's simply too inconceivable.
And you move on...
All these syllables of steps speak,
But what do they say to the melting sands?
They say the walker is walking.
They say that both
Are subject to change.
They say that beneath it all,
Where all things meet,
Visible and invisible,
The silent witness
Who will never be seen
But will always see
Breathes.
And you move on...
Beneath your bare feet,
The beach rusts away and dissolves.
Jutting rocks and cliffs rust away,
The whole world rusts away in this swirling solvent
Of salt and oxygen.
You stop to glance back
And see that at your heels
Millennia unfold
Upon the winds,waves, and sands
And reside in every speck
Of stone. Beside the huge ocean
You hug
This slender breast of shore
As waves of change
Chase relentlessly after your feet,
And you move on,
Always moving on...
Forasmuch as the blade of a knife
Cannot cut itself,
So too the mind cannot grasp the mind.
And you move on,
Always moving on...
With something greater than the eye
You see.
With something greater than the mind
You understand.
