THIS SIDE THE FOG

Windless season without rain,
you bring the sea up from the rocks
across the cliffs, drifting clouds...

Gray weaves the night as day
and everything moves like sleep.

Trees climb a hill, lights swing
upon circles of darkness,
walls bend a road where you trespass.

You are the mover, the essence
of all things seen and unseen.

Windless you go and rainless,
without form, color, or motion—
in you, all time is one.

Fog or shadow of God maybe,
who walks and whispers so close to me?

Here on the shore's last link
against the landscape dream
I stand listening.

Intangible as air
and yet like mesh, a web
winds strands about my head.

I can not see or hear
beyond the moment's rim
that holds me to this pier.

Only a sixth sense
of faith or fear, whichever's meant,
sways in the balance.

Through the porthole of my mind
memory ships oars and glides
upon the sea outside.

Whose hand was on the tiller,
what buoy marked the shoals or
whether there was another

I do not know. A hazy twilight
lay over the gray water, and I
heard the distant horn of time

blow once or twice in warning,
while seagulls squatted on the beach,
windless without wings.

And I thought, will it be like that
on the coast of my setting, mast
and sun obscured by fact?

Beyond the eye's threshold
a light swings in the door,
blurred by the wind and blown

like smoke across the dunes
for ghosts who wander through
in search of missing clues.

Dimly they turn and return,
gathering broken sherds
they reefed against the world,

each sorting out his own
to piece the shells into a whole
and find the echo lode.

Blind as a crab in the sand,
waiting for the tide to slack,
I feel through my hands blank,

knowing nothing that they can not reach,
yet groping to believe these
signs of emptiness real.

Ground, sea, sky, all are merged
in the surrounding surf,
where everything's reversed,

where breath is radar to itself,
antennaed to gray silence,
and only I move, nothing else.

Along the coast a lone train
tolls the night, slowing its race
to a throttled brake

as a hand plows the mist
to draw a moving bridge
across the mainland's tip.

O magnetic eye that signals
when human daylight fails
and all's invisible,

who guides the current, the flow
of water, air and pole,
what dragon's head node?