Saturday, August 16, 2014

Sand Ozymandias

You sit, and you watch, as the work of a long morning comes apart.

Sandcastles are such peculiar structures, a cement blending of fluid chaos and flecks of stone, blended and built, shaved and sculpted.  And they always come apart.

The collapse comes, first, at the hands of the wind.  It teases the moisture away, chaos dancing away with chaos, wind liberating water.  The waters of chaos gone, the stone loses memory and falls away, fleck by fleck, carefully carved balustrades disintegrating in a moment of forgetting.

The sea rises up next, always does, hiked up fat by the call of the moon.  It teases and tickles up the beach, touching the hem of the castle, gently, stalking, until finally it surges up and forward, one quick blow, reclaiming itself and returning the sand to flat, featureless drabness.

Air and ocean, the tides and gravity, the flow of time and the movement of spheres, returning all to their own order.

I wonder if Solomon ever found time for sandcastles.  He'd have enjoyed them.