Dust

Dust

Dust clots on table ends

A hiving manufactory within

Colluding by concealment

Iota by micrometer rebuking

The rag itself devolves to lint

A cry in code descends in sweat and skin

And bakes a cake in corners left unclean

Its cumbrance plods uncounted, but to be sure

Fatigued and overladen and uncaring

Along moldings under beds

Year by year dust

Should rise and overthrow us in our sleep

Yet vanishes with a snap of electricity

Dust is the planet’s great commodity

Frictioning with kinetic energy

And all around modest transactions fill the air

We have never thought worth seeing

Frayed at the cuffs and stained down the front

Your house become a chest of drawers

Legs that held it upright severed

When it landed sliding from the truck

The intersection’s traffic blares and merges past you

Left cocooned in the toe of a sock

Littered with insect husks

Old silk hankies, their off-color perfume

Didn’t see until the light seeped through the cracks

We swim in a current

The current is a solvent

We are shaken and dissolving

Into dust

Note: Sometimes I tag a poem “Jumping Off”. My Jumping Off poems are titled from the last line or two of an earlier poem, and represent the progress of my abilities, as well as the change in subject matter, in response to the times—from the writing of the original poem to the writing of its Jumping Off form. Here, with “Dust”, and the recently completed “dissolving”, that I’ve linked to, are a pair, beginning with a poem from The Poor Belabored Beast, and going to my next book of presently uncollected poems. (I have done Jumping Off versions from all the poems of my first book, The Nutshell Hatches.)

Jumping Off

dissolving

(2015. Stephanie Foster)