Poetry

Times of Sand

Richard Bready

In science one tries to say something that no one knew before

in a way that everyone can understand. Whereas in poetry . . .

- Dirac (1)

I

The foam along the beach stands up like hills

Seen from aloft. On foot, nine birds patrol

The intertidal zone, their tweezer bills

Ready to pluck small life from every hole

It digs when stranded. This arrangement fills

A fractioned second’s record on a roll

Of photographic film: sand, bubbles, ocean,

And sanderlings, all frozen in mid-motion.

As regular as clockwork toys, the birds

That flee then follow each collapsing wave

Have wound down, count by count, until two thirds

Of once-reported numbers fail (2). To save

Some quotient of those running, time and words

Both fly. The key resource the waters gave

Has new consumers now; supplies of sand

For living on or living off the land

Are limited. The hills, time-lapsed, like foam

Slide flat, flowing in streams back to the sea,

Where many a tiny being makes its home,

Armor and armature, out of the free

Stone molecules dissolved there. Breakers comb

Shell fragments with eroded quartz debris

Of antique landscapes. As these grains combine,

Exceeding slowly and exceeding fine,

A longshore current wipes them sideways. Beaches

Ribbon the coast. In summer, gentle, warm,

Soft-crested rollers fall upslope, and each is

Depositor of sediment to form

Wide flats that winter waves from wind-whipped reaches

Narrow and steepen. Heaped and scraped by storm,

Or levelled by the leavings of fair weather,

The shoreline ebbs and grows. Taken together,

All factors average out so that the coast,

Decade to decade, does not show a lot

Of difference, although in fact almost

The whole has shifted from some previous spot

And will abandon soon its present post.

Dynamic equilibrium is not

A property desirable to buyers

Of property. The migratory fliers

Go elsewhere in lean years for body fat

To fuel them to their tundra nests and fill

Their eggs with calories (3), or, lacking that,

Don’t reproduce (their populations spill

And soar in curves that match their habitat),

But owners, fixed like barnacles, hold still,

A constancy against which every loss

They suffer from the local pitch and toss

Is measured for resentment, as a waste

Of time, of money, spent here to secure

A territory. Watching it defaced,

The beachfront houses by the sea unsure,

The nesteggs threatened, paradise misplaced

Perhaps for years, they think themselves landpoor,

Demand that conservation keep more change

From harming them, and to this end arrange

Groins, jetties, bulkheads, breakwaters, seawalls,

A coastal incrustation hoped to hide

The land that’s shrinking from the wash. Yet all’s

For naught. What order given to the tide

Will stop or slow its motion? In it crawls

And out casts castles pride had fortified

Regardless of the cost. Wave guides, sand traps

Hasten erosion (4). Beaches found on maps

Are lost at sea now, littorally vanished.

For birds, there is no other shore to go

To on the other side; or, they are banished

From remnant feeding grounds by flocks that grow

Whatever happens: busy, noisy, tannish,

These eat, these swim, these bask, run to and fro

For their own reasons, dig, call, squabble, read,

Drive Jet Skis® and dune buggies at high speed,

And make the scene intolerable, except

For such as gulls, who share a human nature

And profit from increase of garbage. Kept

From food or rest, a less aggressive creature,

Thinner for each horizon overleapt

To beat retreat from beasts of greater stature (5),

Flies on, dies on the way perhaps, ends there

Its piece of time with water, earth, and air.

For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present,

and future signifies only an illusion, if a stubborn one.

- Einstein (6)

Two million years or so ago (7), when ice

Platemailed the planet, sanderlings were trotting

Seasidelong back and forth at their precise

Escapement distance from the wavefronts plotting

A line on continental shelves where twice

The modern inshore verge rose dry (8): allotting

Less runoff to each river as they grew,

The glaciers made sea level drop. All through

Those twenty thousand centuries of freeze-

Thaw seesaw tides, a pendulum has swung,

Now with slow fastnesses of crystal seas

Towering above parched prairies, now among

The headlong meltdown torrents that with ease

Have carried megatons to fill the young

Wide-open river mouths with sand and silt,

Which risen oceans gradually rebuilt

As barrier island, beach, bar, shoal, or spit,

While flattened barrens shed their load of frost,

And pioneering lichens bit by bit

Cracked rock to soil. Grown fertile, sedged and mossed,

Swarmed in sextillions, warmed through long sunlit

High-latitude spring evenings, land forelost

To life, recovered by that layer bloomed

And buzzed until the glacial spread resumed.

The yearly birds flew north as they do now

To country so congenial for breeding,

Its densities of prey sometimes allow

A pair to double-clutch (9), each parent leading

The brood it hatched. Birthrate increase is how

They best exploit their ice edge niche, succeeding

By an excess that balances, all told,

Eggs eaten, fledglings dead of sudden cold,

And juveniles not most of which survive

The first great journey southward. Shorter days

Trigger the hormones governing their drive

To longer flight. They travel unknown ways

Hinted by instinct’s “Warmer” and arrive

At a new sight, of splashing water—bays,

Coves, estuaries, gulfs—and a new urge:

To eat along the outswash by the surge.

Food is their fate now, find it or become it,

With migrant raptors waiting to attack

Flocks fear assembles; though each day kills some, it

Spares others, safe in numbers. Any lack

Of intake is as lethal. Rule of thumb: it

Requires one week’s weight gain to win back

Strength spent while flying several dozen hours,

Two miles up, at the limit of their powers,

As they must, several times (10). Such wingwork done,

The autumn equinox sees them beside

Six continents, three where the tropic sun

Will follow, three where residents abide

Gale, chill, and dark. Metabolisms run

So fast in them, they take these in their stride,

For nearer birds find, when they next set forth,

Prime sites available throughout the north.

The latest species in its genus (11), fleet

And strong, evolved for margin profits, goes,

Like dawn-age horses as they found their feet,

Tiptoe for speed and so needs no hind toes (12).

Well suited to life’s cycles by a suite

Of adaptations, its long history shows

(Say twice (13) the mean survival of the myriad

With which it shared the Quaternary Period

And twenty times (14) the talking hominid’s),

It faces now a geologic chasm:

A mass extinction, when the planet rids

Itself of life-forms in a rapid spasm

Of death and taxa. What has greased the skids?

Intelligence, that popular phantasm,

Modern mutation, prototype, quick fix,

Like feathers on an archaeopteryx,

Plus sociability, an old improvement

Updated to let many use some’s clever

Ideas in ways the few might disapprove, meant

As thought seems for a higher flight. However:

The birds, the years, the periodic movement,

Waving goodbye, off to the big fornever—

These cannot cease to be. As physicists

Know well, time past, past reaching, still exists.

III

The notion of analogy is deeper than the notion of formulae.

- Oppenheimer (15)

The moment that the motor shot the shutter

Across its aperture made light of time,

Set permanent as particles waves’ flutter

In dye-grain diagram, their fall and climb

A message to the future, written water

Formed firm here, framed here, orderly eye rhyme.

Cross-section of an instant and location,

Now reproducible from information

Locked in its dots, on any page or screen

By ink or current, image can outlast

Occasion, lives, and place. The pictured scene,

Once out of site and into mind, broadcast

Through spacetime, will in changeless silence mean

The singular event—aloud, amassed—

When and wherever probability

Distributes copies. Versatility

Makes sand a subject, means, and measure. Melt

Quartz crystals, then cool quickly; they will change

From solids, patterned molecules all dealt

In face and edge and angle, to a strange

Irregular stilled liquid that is felt

To be a crystal though its parts arrange

Themselves amorphously, which is why glass

Slows light so bends light but lets most light pass,

Lens-gathered to a focus (some reflects,

And windows kill a billion birds a year (16),

Brains bloodied by false azure). What detects

Incoming photons and gets camera gear

Adjusted, bright or dark, as it directs,

Is sand again. Cooked, oxygen will clear

Out of its silica. The siliconic

Atomic lattices for electronic

Controls and sensors slice time even thinner

Than wristwatch quartz vibrating at a snappy

Two-to-the-fifteenth cycles. But the winner

On small scales is the theoretician, happy

To calculate a metric for the inner

Dimensions of the quanta - as a frappé:

Instead of worldline sequences, fluxed foam

Of separate points, past, present, and to come,

And here a place and there a place, yet such

That none leads to another, though they share

Contingent borders, layered nothing much

Between the megagoogolths really there (17).

So water’s surface tension keeps in touch,

Its clingfilm tight around the pressure air

Stirs into it, the contour of a bubble

Upheld by balanced forces in their double

Act. Crossing from one compound to the next,

Repeatedly, refractedly, bounced back

And froth-diverted, light rays, veering, flexed

Along a zigzag and redundant track,

Writhe off in all directions. Sight, thus vexed,

Perceives an opaque white, a shadow black

As if from density, the same way clouds,

Mere pressure gradients collecting crowds

Of droplets, can seem stiff as any stone

That clouds erode with rain and snow while falling

To gravity, the leveller. Downthrown,

Sandpile and surf combine, one smoothed, one sprawling,

To shape a fleeting looking glass: birds shown

Inverted, rippled, blue background recalling

The air, where particles that scatter light

Favor this color’s energy. From flight

The birds drop to a triple point, of sky,

Land, sea, the basic phases matter shifts

As ever since that eon when the dry

Young planet outgassed water at such rifts

As now spread underwater. Floating high

On flowing rock, each continent that drifts

Has closed and opened oceans, heaved up coasts

In mountains, ground those cloud-compelling hosts

To rubble nubbins, and then sand. The age

Of any grain on any hand may be

More than two thousand million years (18), by stage

In magma, granite, river, delta, sea,

Stone, uplift, ice, beach, dune, and desert. Gauge

Of deep time, it implies activity:

To crystallize what little bit one knows,

In chance and change, an angle of repose.

…

I have commented before on the pleasures that this blog has brought in putting
me in contact with people I otherwise would not have known. Here is a
quintessential example. This evocative and provocative poem is published here
courtesy of the writer, who describes himself as follows:

Richard Bready retired this year from a career mostly spent working on
dictionaries and encyclopedias. He lives on the Seattle Fault. His email is
richard.bready@gmail.com

The heading image is by MW and the references in the poem are:

Quoted in Oppenheimer, J.R. Age of Science 1900-1950.Scientific American, September 1950. p. 20
Myers, J.P. The Sanderling. Audubon Wildlife Report, 1988/1989. Howe, M.A., Geissler, P.H., and Harrington, B.A. Population Trends of North American Shorebirds Based on the International Shorebird Survey. Biological Conservation, 49 (1989). pp. 185-199
Klaassen, M., et al. Arctic Waders Are Not Capital Breeders. Nature, 413, 25 Oct. 2001, p. 794, discuss the question whether nutrients in eggs of tundra-breeding sanderlings are gathered on migration or on the breeding site, arguing for the latter and citing support for the former.
Kaufman, W., and Pilkey, O. The Beaches Are Moving. Duke Univ. Press, 1983. passim
Highsmith, R.T. No Rest for the Weary? Conservation Sciences, Summer 1997. pp. 18-20
Albert Einstein, Michele Besso, Correspondence 1903-1955 , ed. P. Speziali, Hermann, 1972. p. 538 (to Besso’s daughter and son-in-law after Besso’s death)
Emslie, S.D., and Morgan, G.S. A Catastrophic Death Assemblage and Paleoclimatic Implications of Pliocene Seabirds of Florida. Science, 264, 4/29/94. pp. 684-685
Davis, R.A., Jr. The Evolving Coast, W.H. Freeman, 1993. pp. 32, 51
Lenington, S. Evolution of Polyandry in Shorebirds. In Behaviour of Marine Animals, 5. Shorebirds: Breeding Behaviour and Populations, ed. J. Burger and B.L. Olla. Plenum Press, 1984. pp. 151-166. Gill, F.B. Ornithology. W.H. Freeman, 1990. pp. 302, 311
Castro, G., and Myers, J.P. A Statistical Method to Estimate the Cost of Flight in Birds, Journal of Field Ornithology, 59(4). pp. 369-380. Ibid and Rickles, R.E. Ecology and Energetics of Sanderlings Migrating to Four Latitudes. Ecology. 73(3), 1992. pp. 833-844. Castro, G. Energy Costs and Avian Distributions: Limitations or Chance?—A Comment. Ecology. 70(4), 1989. pp. 1181-1182. Myers, J.P., Maron, J.L. and Sallaberry, Michel. Going to Extremes: Why Do Sanderlings Migrate to the Neotropics? Neotropical Ornithology. Ornithological Monographs No. 36
Evolutionary hypothesis, taxonomic history, as until recently named Crocethia alba. Choate, E. Dictionary of American Bird Names. Gambit, 1973. p. 118. Matthiessen, P. The Wind Birds. Viking, 1973. p. 80
Heinrich, Bernd. Why We Run. HarperCollins, 2002. pp. 159-160.
May, R.M., Lawton, J.H., and Stork, N.E.: Assessing Extinction Rates; Ehrlich, P.R.: The scale of the Human Enterprise and Biodiversity Loss, both in Extinction Rates , ed. Lawton and May, Oxford, 1995. pp. 1-24 and 214-226, especially pp. 2, 3, and 220. Chapters in the same work by Coope and by Thomas and Morris indicate that prey species, in contrast, are coevals.
Bickerton, D. Language and Evolution. U. Wash., 1995. pp. 68-70. Lieberman, P. Uniquely Human. Harvard, 1991. pp. 36-73
Electron Theory: Description and Analogy. J. Franklin Carlson Lecture, Iowa State University, 1955
Klem, D. Glass and Bird Kills: An Overview and Suggested Planning and Design Methods of Preventing a Fatal Hazard. Wildlife Conservation in Metropolitan Environments, National Institute for Urban Wildlife Symposium, Set 2
Wheeler, J.A. and Patton, C.M. Is Physics Legislated by Cosmogony? in The Encyclopedia of Ignorance, ed. R. Duncan and M. Smith. Pergamon, 1977. pp. 38-64 (originally in Quantum Gravity , ed. C.J. Isham, R. Penrose, D.W. Sciama, Clarendon, 1975). Hawking, S.N., Page, D.N., and Pope, C.N.: Quantum Gravitational Bubbles. Nuclear Physics B170, 1980, pp. 283-306
Siever, Raymond. Sand. W.H. Freeman, 1988. p. 217

Originally published at: https://throughthesandglass.typepad.com/through_the_sandglass/poetry/