Erosion.

Sand & ash
aren’t the same thing but they mix well. Ash of course is fire’s ghostly
afterthought, and has sacramental associations. It’s smooth, powdery,
and will blend between your finger and your thumb, nicely coating
the grooves and what are called the friction ridges of your fingertips.
Sand is pebblier, playful, and has to do with oceans and apparently
with glass. Neither ash nor sand are that third thing we call dust.
I like to mix sand and ash, smoke and water, by burning incense
in the zen garden which I keep in a square baking pan on my desk.
Once I sifted through the garden with a sieve to get the big stones out.
What rose in a haze over the sieve, lighter than gravity, was dust.
I tasted it.

I breathed it in.
My garden has two rocks in it. The first is from the rio grande:
it’s smooth, a flattened river stone, white with houndstooth pattern.
The second is vishnu schist, lowermost and oldest of all formations
(kaibab, supai, tapeats) exposed by cutting action of colorado river
through epic plateau. My piece of vishnu is about a billion and change
years older than me, and it is unreflective gray. I like to boast of it—
to call mine what could not be less. Third in my garden is a much worn
coin from a beach in bali. I prop it in a corner of the pan: faint 500
imprinted on one side, faint eagle or garuda on the other.
I remember that beach,

finding that coin.
I was obsessed then with lines from a poem by linda gregg:
mostly I looked away, she writes, to another mountain where I felt
the goddess used to be. Where I walked / so often in her absence.
Finding / ancient shards, negotiating for my soul / with the leftover
facts of the Earth. / Reconciling with what love is. Always alone.
My garden buries facts in sand, and this is a desert poem, just as
early saints who lived on columns in the wild for years were called
the desert fathers. I have a confession to make. My garden lives
not on my desk,

but on the altar
where I practice sitting still. I must have been ashamed to say this.
Why? Must I lie about everything? I am so dishonest, as if dishonesty
will save me. The truth is I pray all the time. The last object on my altar
is an enormous jeffrey or perhaps coulter pinecone, I never can recall,
which I took from yokoji, in california. I felt sheepish, bashful wanting it,
but this pinecone has my heart: it’s fucking nuts, huge, sharp, heavy armor,
dravidian, druidic, and pierre there at yokoji assured me it was fine,
they burn them anyway

because they pop car tires.
There will never be another pinecone after this one.
I wish you could heft it: god’s own grenade.
And the pebbles I saved from my garden, the ones
too crude to keep? I took them to the lake
and I dropped them in the water.