Nov. 02

....How enthralled we are to cracked teacups,
broken fingernails and wash stands, cementing these parts in place
before we can even try to breath, pulling the tiny impurities in
before we can exhale them, particles that catch the sun and flash
distinctly as tiny astronomical bodies amplified by telescopes–
they began as quirks, little folds of molecular proportions, then matter,
carpet dust, ground-up crumbs, who knows – collected around
irregularity, unlike the others, with its tiny logic, its own angles
and how it registers whatever surrounds it, or buoys it, air currents
you could map and color-code, has been entirely its own business.
Because couldn’t there be an especially solipsistic piece of dust,
couldn’t a piece assert that no -- in fact it doesn’t move -- rather
the world moves around it, the apartment in which it was trapped,
the starlings on the sill who peered in one direction, the flies
that gestated through late winter to debut a blue-green iridiscence,
the window opened and closed so often, and look outside:
the glass terminals around which are wrapped the power lines–
couldn’t the energy bound upon this terminal be a bit much,
scattering an electron field that flusters the sensual world
down to a handful of items, an unmade bed, a sleeping bag
pinned behind the headstand with a pup tent and a guitar–
a dust particle apparently obedient to whirls that in fact
sets its own terms and allows itself to be buffeted. Maybe
disintegration will remake it – when do the elements in matter,
after all, go away completely? How the building-blocks of life
not rise from the ground, another manifestation, earth re-arranged,
whether by bombs that upend earth or a time that excruciates?