TALK OF DUST

You go through several stages in the acceptance of dust:
Revulsion, a vague, feeble want of escape.
This settles into the mind at last as a kind
of terrible glory.
What vibrates in our lungs
could be the final, desperate filaments
of Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, Jimi Hendrix.

Look! The late afternoon sun blazes with dust,
gold motes lit up like a decaying consciousness.
But the awful science is always behind it--
That dust is just our sloughed-off spores of abandon;
bone-shavings, hair and skin, our umbilical cords
murdered worms, burned as medical waste in New Jersey.

There is no life without dust.
Nothing can be said without
the low murmurs of the dead behind us.
We're alone, yet we know that is not the end of it.
My last lover still here, gathering her ashen beards,
her spider's nests beneath the radiator.