Poem 5

This is a poem about sand and my relationship to it. I mostly wrote it when I realized later than most that glass is, at a basic level, melted sand. I think most people realize this within the first decade or two of their lives, but I never really grasped the concept until my early twenties.

Giving inanimate objects human qualities is called "pathetic fallacy" by scholars. I like doing it anyway.

Silicon

Giving away the sand,
a beach clings to human feet,
sneaking between toes,
inside swimsuits,
stuck to the bottom of a cooler.
She makes leaving into taking.
A mineral parasite,
she scatters on kitchen floors.
I have swept her out of tents
and found her still in old shoes.
Beach blows across windy noons
forcing us to cover eyes
and mouths or else spit
tastes of her on to the towel.
But occasionally she
finds a clarity in herself-
flowing amidst heat to
stillness in a frame-
and shows a boy the rain,
even as it runs down her in pearls,
or the red of an autumn
that stings his eyes.