Daily Office

This short commute to my daily office,
like winning some holy lottery: held

to lose my self  to the grand humility of rock and lichen,
tangled sea kelp, shore crabs and tide pools,

to watch the narrowing sea between granite shoulders
blinking with starfish, jellyfish, chitons and urchins,

to sit, until my eyes bring down comet tails
and the stars break into spindrift,

to be reconciled to my rightful pool
on God’s botanical beach,

and leaving my burdens to the Scotch broom bluffs,
I steep in slow galactic joy…

is this to know
something of the ultimate?

and why—among the congregations of gooseneck
barnacles and rolling blooms of sea anemone—

strive for anything less, or more,
than the company of a cobbled beach?

yet for all this intimate hereness, I return
(or I’m returned), to the veiled world

of time and happenstance, hoist bike and bag
and head on down the shore—

one more disordered aspirant
for the Order of Holy Fools.