What nourishes the polar star?
That’s a story I refuse to tell.
Bellhops lacking a pineapple?
Or the secret ingredient of bubblebath?
Itself a derailed story. And still
stuntmen by the school are washed ashore.
What would be inappropriate here is deep-
fried calamaries, or the sound of a crossbow
humming. I have been reading for hours,
I am counting every little grain of sand.
Saturday night in Amherst: Archimedes is my man.
I drift toward nightfall, renaming all
the recent immigrants from Antartica. 
(“We shall have a good voyage if God is willing.”)
Disconsolate bunglers, incalculable cloves,
the Ship sang. Ginger scurvy.
Then I took one of them around to see chlorophyll
working in the meadow, and later bought him
a porkpie hat. Night was coming on, hell,
night had come and gone and I was still
reading, reading my way through the library.
Night had come and gone leaving not a trace
except me, and I by necessity had moved on
and was by now reading, Magellan’s Voyage,
a Narrative Account of the first Circum-
navigation by Antonia Pigafetta. Poor mad
Ferdinand died spectacularly at the hands
of Filipino warriors. Seventeen hundred
years before a fellow named Eratosthenes 
calculated the circumference of the earth
to be 24,650 miles—not a bad guess, only
two-hundred and twenty-five off. Well,
I was reading about all these stargazers
and felt this aching desire for a newer world
when Adventures of a Red Sea Smuggler
tumbled off the shelf. I love Henry de Monfreid
for writing, “I went to see the pyramids.
What a disappointment they were to me…”
His reason: the majesty of the desert
could not be obscure.

Sunday morning in Amherst, I have spotted
a water buffalo! Emily Dickinson
has decided to purchase several mohair jackets,
but it is Sunday and I regret to report
she has not been a very good neighbor lately.
“Tears are my angels now,” she said to me
around 4 A.M. “But are they interested 
in Cedar Rapids?” I asked. “I’m not qualified 
to say,” was her sorry reply. And so it went,
the sound of a crossbow humming, my own
jungle fever. My weary and blossoming Soul
was passed from hand to hand to hand.
I was resting in the center of some huge pageant
when a human standing next to me said:
“
There must be more,” and set out to find it
against all odds, against the known sum.
And years later, either came back or didn’t,
was the biggest fool ever, or shines there
on the horizon, like a newly minted coin of hope.
And those who stayed and mocked, and those
who merely read about it later—the grains
of untrammeled sand fall through their brains
long after the sojourner has begun to snore.


The Sand Reckoner  is a work by Archimedes, an Ancient Greek mathematician 
of the 3rd century BC, in which he set out to determine an upper bound for the 
number of grains of sand that fit into the universe. In order to do this, he had to 
estimate the size of the universe according to the contemporary model, and invent 
a way to talk about extremely large numbers.