Belief

Belief is fool’s gold,

Aloysius said. I left the table,

as my pockets jingled,

and it’s never good to argue

at a meal. I believe

a holy fool is rich,

and, there, I’ve said it.

So he welcomes evening sun,

believing that his star

will rise forever.

He sleeps so well

among the sodden logs

that lie beside the sea,

that suck and sink

all night in sand, too deep

to find him without digging.

And he blinks through morning

over quiet breakfast

on the glassy beach

that lifts him up.

Over simple lunch, he grazes

slowly as he reads his sutras,

or he gives and takes

among the troubled ones

he knows, and they are legion.

But he talks them through,

as he has hours to give away.

The afternoon may find him

sleeping as the tide slips in.

He’s spindrift, foam-foot.

Oystercatchers call him

cheep, cheep, cheep.

His mind is golden wrack

and salt-weed, caught

and coiled among the jawbones,

exoskeletons of craw.

These shreds don’t faze him,

as he’s moving on,

and sleep’s unreason rolls

him back to his belonging.

He believes that dreams

tell goodly tales. And so he listens,

learns in sleeping that the only story

is the one he’s known

and told again, sung slowly

in the hollow conch,

the hocus pocus of the holy meal

taken together

on the long, white cloud

where each will gather

in a brave communion of pure souls,

conjoined and dancing

on the sand at sunrise

or around the fiery pit at night,

these goodly natives

of the world we win and lose,

win back each day

from morning into smoke-fall

dusk, from wine dark wane

to everlasting dawn.