The sculptor builds a schooner out of sand;
crowds marvel at the way it stands
upright, its sails full for all the world as if fanned
by a great wind. He knows his stuff,
has gathered sand in quantities enough
to grasp its fluid ways, the bluff
involved in working with the very small,
that any moment his tall, tawny ship may fall
into a heap; it's this that ties the crowd in thrall,
and him. Through a microscope he's seen these grains,
as individual as human faces, or stars, never one the same,
their odd chain-like behaviour the kind he aspires to tame.
He's watched Gyuto monks
with their vivid mandalas of sand: minute chunks
of graded colour form buddhas, flowers, tree trunks,
animals, stars, all linked within a circle,
later swept up and poured into a river, rejoining the cycle
of erosion, abrasion, suspension, deposition, the trickle
of grains like that in an hourglass
reminding us weeks, months, years will pass
and we will pass with them, at last
coming to rest like sand at a point bar
or the mouth of a rare wild river, far
from home, but home, beneath our star.