Issue #1 Winter 2002
House of Sand
by Sarah Lindsay
Living in this hourglass with the rest of us,
by now you may have noticed the dimple
forming in the center of the floor.
We can guess the outcome, but not the particulars.
Given any heap of grains,
the variables may be fewer than infinite,
but not by enough to do us any good.
No one has mastered the physics of sand,
not even with theoretical perfect spheres,
much less the real stuff--snowflakes being
the prettiest example, but cornflakes
are just as ornery settling down, or cinders.
Spill of salt, trickle of flour,
mound of sugar, hill of beans.
And don't forget the sly ways of dust.
Feed corn blows out the side of a steel silo
built to withstand mere gravity;
barley forms a moveless arch
just long enough for a puzzled farmer
to step inside and look up.
The Sahara's crawling muscles
boom at dusk; their low-pitched music
defeats notation, voice of the forces
that bloom in a dune or give it veins like lightning.
Shift, sift, avalanche, stasis,
no average behavior, no bell curve, no workable model,
but nothing so recognizable as disorder,
it's a pattern that, as you slide to the middle
bit by bit, you can never watch
long enough to understand.©2000 Sarah Lindsay
Sarah Lindsay's new book in the Grove Press Poetry Series is Mount Clutter. Her previous book, Primate Behavior, was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award. She has been published in The Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, Rhino, Constellation, The Pedestal Magazine and others. She works as a copy editor in Greensboro, North Carolina.