Billions upon trillions
of feldspar gray-blue, calcite green, 
granite pink granules glint
silver against the moon’s
mystic quiet. A vast river
of beach not pretending
to be galaxy, but telegraphing what
it really is, what, by molecular
magic it can become: more
than rough tetrahedral grist, more
than a ribbon of velvet solitude
witness to an ocean’s
dizzying moods. Each grain’s 
refracted spark yearns
toward change, longs
to be gathered, touched
melted and melded, weakened
and tempered, to alter atomic chains
to sheets, to a random disorder
like liquid horizon, but formed, rigid
and unstable, a clarified vessel
capable now of cradling still 
in its own hollow well that very force
that crushed it, carried it whole
hundreds of miles from mountain 
homes, breaking silica from quartz, 
capable now of a transparency, 
a forgiveness
whose irregular crystalline structure
defies solidity.
                        

By way of spinning
our raw fiber into some serviceable
beauty, infidelity
might become a small constant
flame gasping fresh air, coiling
in one direction, a puff of wish
drifting off the other, spiraling
through a fairytale dream, 
or a rapt winging of magpies
along the periphery
of could have. An ancient
ache for something shiny
and continuous to believe. 
As when the tangled fleece
sheared from what we name
Love, reveals a naked carcass
of need. Who feeds
that hunger, slakes that thirst,
warms that porous flesh
incapable of holding its own
body’s heat? We forget we were
cursed, that we are upright
animals of want wont to wander,
to dwell among sheer cliffs
of desire, condemned
to discontentment with our own
territories.
                        

On butchering day
did they bother with the sacred
entrails, think to divine
our futures from the condition
of no longer vital organs; 

were the warm livers firm, plump 
as licorice, smooth and glossy 
as river tumbled fire agate
or pitted and shrunken
as frost kill cherries?

Were my grandfather a priest
or grandmother a priestess
or mother an oracle—
though her suspicions
often proved prophetic—

perhaps dangerous secrets
would have bled into the light;
had someone inspected the bowels,
spoken with the spleens
they may have foretold the wars

and diseases, affairs and divorces,
though maybe we could not
as ancients believed
avoid our particular fates.
But we live in a strange age strung

between superstition and reason.
Scoff at such ways of seeing.
Sacrifice nothing to no gods. 
Do we still need to be warned
war cripples all soldiers?

That breathing napalm fumes 
infects lungs, that no one truly survives
the theater? Do we still need evidence
that DDT and glyphosate are poisons
we should not eat or drink?