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Edited on Fri Feb-22-08 11:47 AM by BlueIris
"Dust"
The dust on the hardwood floor around your bed is fine gray, like the underside
of a leaf in rain, like newsprint or calligraphy, particulate but also crumpled with
hair, lint, fuzz, dirt, grain. Run a finger through it and the stipple of skin is
down on a peach, the dimple of mold on bread.
Just look how dust is settled in, an old friend who in better days
has stood on the treeless plain under the midnight sun and abled down glittering
canyons in the dry heat of Spain: he now shrugs absently from the couch,
flipping through channels on the t.v. again.
Wrapped in your best afgahn, he is content to watch one western
after another, especially the parts where the horses thunder into the distance
in a rising cloud of dust. And so night after night you come home to his snoring
and the blinding static that ends the tape.
Soon it's too late. Though you pound the throw rug on the landing each morning
like a faithful muezzein, he never gets the hint. His hapless things are strewn
in every shrinking corner of the room, and he goes off to soak in the tub,
always clogging the drain. His fingerprints show up
in all the likely places—lintels, mantles, shelves and sills—and some unlikely ones as well:
in the fine mesh of window screens, one mote thick; in the grooves of records
and on the needle tracking through them; in sunlight angling through the window afternoons;
in the lengthening sleeves of shade. There they are
on bookshelves around the shapes of books; on tabletops around
the still-life shapes of things on tables—ashtray, fruitbowl, vase;
on the tin grating of every air duct in the world. So maybe dust is what the dead do
not in their spare time, but all day long?
Dust, as a matter of fact, voice faint and scratchy from too many cigarettes,
concurs: if I were you, he slurs, I'd give up now.
He has a point perhaps. Rubbing his eyes, he looks ready for another nap.
You leave it to him—hush hush, and other drowsy words to the wise.
—Kevin Craft
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