Syllables of Steps

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 shore

About 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.