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.