When Tibetan Buddhists Visited My Town

They spent four days making a vision of harmony with grains of sand, a mandala with compassion at its core. They made a center of energy that anyone watching fell into a tiny orbit around. They sang and chanted. Then, because life is impermanent, they destroyed the arrangement and gave some of the colored sand away. The rest they will drop into the nearest flowing water, where it will reach the rest of the world, where on my board it will pass over and under me eventually, where I will think back and wonder if, all those months before, that was me I saw on one of those blue-green curls.