I felt restless earlier in the day--in the afternoon, about 4, 4:30. Too much coffee, maybe. Maybe not.

Went down to the beach. My favorite Esquimalt cove, Fleming: the old heath battlefields. Just before sunset--just before the turn of the tide. Deep November sky--a rift appears to the Southwest, pale lake beaming down, the sun far beyond that. Out towards the peripheries of sight arcs of thin green in the white-yellow, and a pale rose and a dark rose edge the clouds. They ripen my autumn eyes. Later to fall on an orchard floor, the foundation of dreams. Into long heath grasses now they fly, where with boot-toes walkers strip paths through tubular stems of dandelions: at last to nourish the seeds of shouts of joy, glad dancing, and the rising song.

In among the rocks of other coves my voice once vanished, calling something. Something slept a painful sleep since then. But some nights--some clear, ice-cold starry nights!

Carve thy thin mind, God, into the broad hill's shoulder.

A silence from the light years--and from the dark years. But it's OK. It awaits its moment. What to hold meanwhile? Whatever we see is in the past, because light takes some time to reflect off things, or to come from things. Time rushes inward from most distant galaxies to the Now of our eyes and hands.

I break some cedar driftwood for kindling. Start a fire. Gull shadows scissor out of the shining grey of water, following the coast, going West. A pristine luxury of grace. If one scanned for their depths, one might simply locate their other side--the profile lit by a yellow winter rift: the searchlight's widest focus, the winter flag, or rag, of the sun dimming over the USA--no lost forests, no hearts howling, no horror of death, no shallows--just pure gliding shadows figured out of and figuring out the wind.

Intermittent rain. I go under a cliff-overhang. Downtown out beyond the cliff's shoulder. Lights coming on. The rain stops, I tend the fire. Watch a smooth unfolding of shadows. Smell of woodsmoke, and when I am upwind, smell of the sea coming in around the smoke, through the open eyes of the fire. The gentle sound of the water as the tide turns. A cow bears a calf, licks it clean with her long, rough tongue. And the fire--a rushing up--transfigurations in the meeting of elements--a distance-dance of my own wishes, transfigurations cast in changing flames--hunting for a red "exit" sign somewhere deep in the fire: a door to the world, the far frontier of dreams.

Cedar pops, crackles, an old record--chronicles of epochs, aeons, ages changing under a November sky. Why not? What's on TV? What's on the radio? Who is in the limelight? My headlines in the evening edition ran the sun's wild banners across the Southwest, pale rain of light over Washington mountain ranges the color of pencil graphite--not dreams of sleep--announcing my moment by the fire to my own eyes as I become deeper awake. More gulls go by, some cry a greeting to my fire--and flights of smaller birds pace their own reflections just above the water's surface. They move really fast.

It gets darker. I build up the fire--now old, now new, wild restless voice of red and orange, sparks with streamers--juggle of a thousand sparks of light from the fire's hands into the hands of darkness as it gathers. The fire's arm around my shoulder, the sea on her last period of the moon's turning to face away from autumn. Distant lights--ships, a green buoy-signal revolving--they are punctuation on the horizon-line. An old tree root that I and Harp-Dog Howell watched weeks ago--an archaic petrified horse-skeleton, twisted from long riding, rocking pastures of the deep--now breached, now beached, a giant driftwood flower of the cove, gnarled and flickered through with faces, shapes of all kinds.

I watch the wind's flight over the sea's surface--toward shore. The sparks wrench jagged courses of bright beauty. The fire's circle over the stones cuts their profiles in orange out of the darkness. The seam of the horizon is sewn up. And what sounds are high enough to fly out of the city alight here from that distance: a train whistle, over and over, persistent as a barking dog to moonlight. No night train's whistle calling the hounds of hobos out to thousand-mile rides on warm nights in Spring and Summer, or like Orion whistling the dog star out to fetch the shot heart of loneliness, the tuned string of unnamed longing in the hobo's heart--No blues-night train, but the Dayliner, bound down-island from Duncan, Nanaimo, points North. The sound of sirens--insane birds of the city, yowl downwind to my cove of peaceful night. To the crackle of my driftwood fire, its joyful throwing skyward big handfuls of sparks.

I try to read--but darkness and the smell of the cliffs behind me mocks words on pages. In firelight I sit back, and stretch--and think big, dark thoughts of whales somewhere out there across the street from the dreams of Humankind. Do they sleep?

Do they sink through fathomless waters, hark to the tales of their brothers and sisters hemisphere to hemisphere?

Ah, I got thirsty after the tide touched out my fire. But I close my eyes, and the coals still burn. Among the ashes I found these words.