Tools of Mastery

1
He came from tides and the long trail of his wish.
He waited and still can wait. His head now on the
board. A cable of flesh from his calf he never sees;
when he falls, he never queries knowable stars.

Who knows what kind of man he is
when he goes down to the water;
they've watched him go out a thousand times,
yet, did he make the right interpretations?

He is not a fisher, nor a fisher of men's souls;
from his water he has teased the salt and brine.
His rudder and his rope have come into clear waters
and his net is cast within his reach of strength.

Was it the secret of the water's muscle
that it could break a man, his house, his name,
or that the upward wave, so hard and swelling,
could give a man everything he needed

so long as he had the right desires?

2
Or was it simply a guess he made when locust came
that if he gave everything else up
it would turn out to be all right?
that the thing he did do would be the best he could do,
and the single eye that every man sought
could be his, with rocks, water, rain.

It takes so many years to use the world,
so many summers and matters ending,
so long at wanting early what has no fancy,
no goodly parts or sound and loved too much.

Mastery is the matter. Not life. That comes again.
Mastery is the steady cunning in your wish. But how
do I learn cunning at my hour? or attendance even
before the blue of the sky and my heavy body
climb to the small leaf of my wish?

Sleep is already in the night that holds all tides,
that one of these could pass without a rider?
Was it for him to go? He no longer hears
the old moth on the new moth wing;

haunted nights by riders, moth kingdoms,
and ebony tides.

http://www.greatestlivingpoets.com/excerpt1.htm