Hourglass
The sea keeps its dead
by teaching them
the language of salt.
Time is less gentle.
It teaches them sand.
Each century bends above its work,
patient as a millstone.
A king becomes a grain.
A child becomes a grain.
A hand once held by another hand
becomes a grain.
By morning,
the glass is full of them.
They gather in the upper chamber
like pale weather,
pressed shoulder to shoulder
with ruined cathedrals,
unwritten letters,
the last breath of a wolf
in a forest that no longer exists.
Then the falling begins.
Not all at once.
One ancestor at a time.
One promise at a time.
The neck of the hourglass
is so narrow
that forever must pass through it
single file.
Listen.
The sound is almost beautiful.
An empire brushing against a lullaby.
A wedding ring
striking the rib of a shipwreck.
Snow settling
inside an abandoned mouth.
The grains arrive below
without their names.
Without their faces.
Without the color of their eyes.
Yet something survives.
A warmth.
A longing.
The faint memory of being awaited.
Sometimes a grain hesitates
at the throat of the glass.
Caught for a moment
between what was
and what will be.
I think that is where ghosts come from.
Not from death,
but from the brief terror
of becoming smaller.
Outside the window,
another generation is planting gardens,
building houses,
swearing forever into the dark.
Already the hourglass
is learning their weight.
Already the centuries
are sharpening their edges.
The glass says nothing.
It has seen oceans
made from bones.
It has watched stars
shed their light
and join the falling.
Still it stands,
holding two worlds apart:
those who are becoming memory
and those who do not yet know
they are.
When the final grain descends,
there is no judgment.
No trumpet.
No great unveiling.
Only a hand
older than history
turning the hourglass over,
and the dead rising together
like a constellation
returning to its first shape.
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