How to get familiar with infinity . . .
A camel ride into the Sahara
to stargaze a wide open desert sky?
The astronomer Carl Sagan once said
stars outnumbered grains of sand on beaches—
so I rode a camel from Merzouga
out into oceanic dunes of sand
and sat there after sunset for the stars,
dwelling for a time with two infinities,
it seemed, or was it two eternities?
I felt forever in the sandy dust
flowing like a fountain through my fingers.
I found endless sand and stars to ooh and ah.
Beholding leads to praying. Inshallah.
The Sahara’s surface of sand measures approximately 3.5 million square miles, the size of the contiguous U.S. Washed by the wind rather than water, its fine grains are unsuitable for making concrete.
After retiring as curator of historic maps at Princeton University Library, I moved out to Port Townsend, WA, and have traveled widely, preferring remote, natural settings. Since that transition, I’ve published Waypoints (2017), a collection of place poems, Twenty Questions (2019), a chapbook, Delicate Arch (2022), poems and photographs of national parks and monuments, and Galápagos (2023), a collaborative chapbook of my son Andrew’s photographs and my poems.