The sand wave

3/31/2005

I can't believe this is the first item of the year. The end of April, the middle of Aries, after the equinox and its full moon and Easter. The year when spring came in February and the rain is now scrubbing away all traces of it.
So, diving in, the wasted graph, the graph you don't want to read but which allows all graphs that come after it. The widget, the holly, ivy, berry, red raspberries in the back yard, not to mention dandelions. yellow suns and the blood of the holly and berries, color spots, spots. spots you walk on and those you avid. dark spots. the new leaves in the elms have brought back the mystery of summer. there are footsteps above, can I concentrate regardless. there's a pot on the stove heating my mush, can I concentrate regardless. can I not worry about spelling, about the disease, about the roughness in my neck. roughness. bark, scratching sand sandpaper sand in gears stuff that stops things, dust in the arteries, dust in the machinery, not on the fields the dust blows away leaving the rocks without a cover. the footsteps are distracting.

Ah, earphones. The mush is now with me with honey and strawberries. This graph too will be a throwaway as I lean into the alpha. waves crash and... waves of sand. a tsunami of sand, rising and rising, the component grains ordered into a cresting Japanese wave. It washes over the village and covers everything. it's an annoyance, all right. Jurgla sighs and gets out the heavy feather sweeper and pushes the sand off the table and across the floor and out the door to the yard. The sand is tan today, sand color, and full of sea-sand nutrients. It will grow good gourds. They have sand inside them, but once you wash it out the seeds are delicious. It's never occurred to Jurgla to eat the fruit. Perhaps that's a good thing, because the fruit would make her desperate to fly kites. People who eat of the fruit of the gourd of the island where the sand waves wash over go mad with flying kites. They can't stop to eat, so they starve. Their legs give out as they race across the sand, trailing bits of balsam wood. The kites are made of their mothers' old nylons, and they never need tails because the wind over the island is constant. If the wind ever changed, the sand waves would lose their integrity and the sand would sink back into the sea. Eventually the wind would blow the remaining sand off the rocks of the island and nothing would grow. Islanders would have to stop flying kites, if they could, and haul buckets and buckets of sand to cover the rocks so they could grow gourds and maybe an occasional paw paw. Otherwise, they live on the eggs of shore birds. Sometimes you can see a bird riding the sand wave, regal in its warm embrace, flying off just before the sand crashes onto the rocks and covers the village.

The islanders, then, pray to the wind. they pray that it will stay constant so they won't have to haul sand themselves. They fly prayer kites, a constant line of color, the color of dandelions and raspberries and holly berries, if only they knew these things. But they were on the island where the colors came from the rocks and from dried yolks of bird eggs and the pollen of the gourds, a strange color we would call raspberry.

It's a strange life on the island, where the music comes from shaking gourds and singing in mimicry of the wind, where the children are allowed to run on the sand and tumble and play as long as they find the requisite three bird eggs apiece every day. And that is play, too, clambering over the rocks of the shore and finding the hidden treasure places where the eggs lie. The birds mourn the loss of the eggs, but they lay new ones, and there are so many more birds than there are islanders, so everything works out. Jurgla sits on her porch and watches the sunset, watches the wind push the clouds in the same direction every day. She sits and drinks coconut juice with an egg in it and knits palm fiber, the bark of palm, dyed ochre with the soft rocks found in the center of the island, ochre the color of the sky, the color of her fingers, stained with the dye.
3/31/2005