SAND

The low voices rise and fall
as they divide up
heaven, shadows, grains of sand.
-Tomas Tranströmer from the poem Solitude (from Swedish, trans. Robert Bly)

Sand is crushed mountains and the ashes of everything that has
  existed.
The sand dunes cross hot countries like stripes of fire.
Sand covers the planets. Moonbeams are reflections in sand.
Sand is the last thing on earth.
Time sleeping.
— Rolf Jacobsen from the poem Sand; from Norwegian trans. Roger Greenwald

Images: a place near Three Corners, the what-is-now convergence of Oregon, California, Nevada.  Photos Douglas Beauchamp May 2020

GOLD 2020

Gold prices hit a new record close of $2,021 per ounce overnight — settling above $2,000 for the first time. — CNBC, August 4, 2020

IMAGE:  Old Glyph, Coso Wilderness, near Death Valley, Inyo County CA.

Points upstream to old mine encampment.

Photo Douglas Beauchamp, March 2018

"THE KINGS OF THE WORLD . . . “

The kings of the world are growing old,
and they shall have no inheritors.
Their sons died while they were boys,
and their neurasthenic daughters abandoned
the sick crown to the mob.

The mob breaks it into tiny bits of gold.
The Lord of the World, master of the age,
melts them in fire into machines,
which do his orders with low growls;
but luck is not on their side.

The ore feels homesick. It wants to abandon
the minting houses and the wheels
that offer it such a meager life.
And out of factories and payroll boxes
it wants to go back into the veins
of the thrown-open mountain,
which will close again behind it.

Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)