Taking the Pulse of Sandstone
After JoAnna Klein’s “Taking the Pulse of a Sandstone Tower in Utah,” New York Times, September 2019
One way to listen to a monolith
is to send two climbers up its cleft spine,
seismometers in tow. Every singing thing calls
to Wingate sandstone the color of forgotten
blood. Against the precipice, percussions of wind,
tectonics, helicopter blades across the valley, even
faraway tides. Castleton Tower pulses, the geologist says,
at the rate of a human heart. How else is music forged
except through centuries and weather? How brief
a whole day’s climb must seem to a summit
still breathing its first exhale, its only note. The whole
desert hums under layers of dust just like
the rust and rest of us. Any heart would thrum
red with generations’ sheddings of song. How else
could sand sculpt from stone a throat and sing?
