This Is Fine
by Lichen Throat

My dad took me out in the desert to get sand,
where a dune piled up against a hill.
He shoveled it into five-gallon buckets,
and loaded them into the back of our truck.
We lined them up on the north side of the house,
so they wouldn’t get brittle in the sun.
Those big rocks over there are boulders,
and cobbles are the size of your fist.
Gravel is about the size of your toes.
This is coarse sand, and this is fine.

In college, in the soils laboratory,
we dug up samples, and dried them in the oven.
We dropped them into a set of stacked sieves,
each one finer than the last.
Put them in the shaker for 30 minutes,
and out they come, all neatly sorted.
Boulders are a quarter meter and up;
cobbles go down to 64 millimeters,
and gravel is between 64 and 2.
This is coarse sand, and this is fine.

Kids tracked sand inside your house
and ground it into the carpet.
That sand is really bad;
that sand is fine.

Dams trap all the sediment
flowing down the Rio Grande,
so the bed keeps getting coarser
and the river gets narrower.
What used to be almost a mile wide
is now just a couple hundred feet.
There aren’t too many boulders yet,
but cobbles are getting more common.
There’s lots of gravel everywhere,
and a little coarse sand—but no more fine.