Out of an urge more felt than known, I have come

Again to that edge where the surf reverberates

With primal sound, a monotone with words

Unformed. The path that whitens where I step

Is littered: polyps and beer cans, rotten fruit,

And shells, abandoned forms of those who knew

The sea. The dogs are off and running, led

By the light, elusive gulls, and I am left

Among the relies where the search begins.

Amid this jetsam of a winter sun

Thought leaps beyond the wrangling gulls, recalls

A silence far more full and more alive,

As if one running ran beyond the earth:

"In the solitude of the unbegun, unknown,

Unknowing, unbegotten yet, you were

The frozen face of possibility.

Until the latent will to act released

You to the fluid fate of time, and you

Became the forms of what you knew.

Fragmented, last among the manifold, knowing

A part, forgetful of the whole, you ran

A labyrinth of pain, impelled by currents

Working to the sea . . ."

That voice is drowned within the roar that holds

Me here among the shells and racing dogs.

This voice is mute; that voice was like a chord

Of breath articulated into song

In which each note resolved into all sound.

Far out to sea, horizon closes down:

Within this shell I make my way. Some say

This ocean's clasp is sweet — but cold, I think.

The sea I seek has quite another feel,

More like a home than this diluvian bed.

There dissolution is release into,

Not only from — where, like a hermit crab,

I'll shed this form, returning, conscious, one.

Meanwhile, the dogs, outwitted by the gulls,

Fetch driftwood from the shallows. Further out

And down, run creatures at a tideless depth

Where the only light is a lure to a waiting mouth.

Dissolved in dream, the mind brings down to this place

Imaginations of another shore

Where children, dogs and men play laughingly

Among the curiosities of time,

And where the sea whispers its secrets to them,

Warms them in a Caribbean breath.