Glass of a thousand sands.
Glass that lets us see right through it.
I never wanted that kind of melting.
3,200 degrees, sunlike, thin,
a sudden rooting inward.
You never get to come back
from that system.
I wanted to be terrestrial,
yielding as a handful
of sand—colorless brain an abacus.
It should be easy, not losing count.
It should be easy to say
without knowing the implications
the word sand, singular
*
and then the dreams come,
silica slick in the bed afterward,
a whole world crushed like a pill
and melted, clear as a spinal
before my body hums home
its cells, turning me
into something countable,
mineral, a kind of currency
running down the river
behind my house, and I can sift
the sand with my fingers
until there’s nothing left,
feeling the grains as they fall away
the tighter I make I fist.