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.
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