Sand Theory: Poems

Dune Grass

21 Dune Grass It is what sand would look like if it could just escape itself and grasp the diffuse and clump around pilings like stumps of teeth ground by tide, risen to whatever inhuman trial it is to have threadbare wind for a coat and a body that has no eyes and no face to love, bent in scarcely rooted supplication. When have we not seen it praying in its own loose unison of piety, in its strength to waver and stay put and outreturn the hulking one-time-only beachfront condos— I’ll worship something that would return to all this. Repeatedly this need to be somewhere real again comes upon land with features that never settle, this treasure so openly fragile it’s beginning to dawn on me that we should all be singing— no place like this anywhere in the world, even the ground one stands on taken up, what it means to escape damnation and holiness and be forever risen into being used right here at my glowing naked toes. We walk right over all this we love the sight of that in it we can love our transience, our hills, their lakes no older than our species, 22 as it turns out earth never belonged to itself, till even despondency seems hopeful evasion. So why this trust, this sudden drop from bluff to lake where sky resides and spars of buried trees are disinterred from dunes, the beached hulls of ghost barns are open houses, bare rafters almost fallen in on their blessed ghost cows? Why do ears settle on lone islets of seething birches, tremblings near an even vaster trembling? For however much I meant to find a human likeness down on its knees, its hands churched together, there’s more room than ever for the booming distances and sand enough for wind to blow beyond all of us who abandoned, betrayed, trampled repeatedly haywire paths, shown nothing new, no, this, right here where there is no dogma or heresy, shimmering just a little above the earth, in its strength to waver and yet stay put lifted by sun and rain into being used, hanging on and letting us come and go. ...