Certainty/Uncertainty

The inevitable descent of home
   on a night baking
   with blurred stars,
   water music
   reverberating in tiny
   salt caves of sea shells.

The dog is unaware-
   he blends with the dark
   and the far off voices.
   They sound like bells
   to the hound, whose nights
   are often spent skirting
   the echoes of men
   while his spirit clamors
   to worship at their hearths.

But his body is too used
   to salted breezes and sand,
   too used and scratched
   and chewed and smudged-
   he blends with the dark.

He is still learning the ways
   of kindness. Still and watchful
   he rests on the beach and
   prays to his far off gods.
   It is the distance that
   sweetens his devotion.

The sea is an uncertainty-
   before him, then gone-
   always disappearing and appearing
   til one no longer questions
   the existence of the surf edge.
   The threshold is unanswerable
   to the way we see the world.

Dog sits. Waves come and go.
   Surf edge continues to lap
   its giant tongue against
   sand white and mottled
   with shells and footprints.

Man walks under stars, as he
   always once did. He treads
   the lip of the ocean,
   being the only certain thing
   between water and distant
   star fires. The water
   and the movement separate,
   simply pulse as two vowels,
   in out

   in

   out

Looking up, the trembling
of stars among darkness
calls down to him
a sense of home.

Prayer 1

The land will always bring you back
the promise is in the dirt and ashes
          thinking about what it would mean
          to a generation to unite "progress"
          with the earth or
bury it within
Hold that promise close to your heart for
it is a sure thing.

A pine forest filled with electricity
defying wiring and safe passage
to a Mohican in a steel canoe
          let me suffer this course too long
Meanwhile the desert waits
under a storm cloud.

The land will bear us again
for the first time as our mothers did
but until then I will keep
my mouth open
and bury hatchets
in favor of ropes
keep my maps
secret.