Poems, 1957–1967

DUST

DUST Lying at home Anywhere it can change not only the color But the shape of the finger that runs along it leaving a trail That disappears from the earth; nothing can follow Where that hand has walked and withdrawn. And I have lain in bed at home and watched Through a haze Of afternoon liquor the sun come down through it Dropping off at the window sill from which the dust has risen With no voice the voices of children to spin In a stunned silence the individual motes All with a shape apiece wool fragments Small segments Of rope tricks spirochetes boring into the very Body of light and if you move your hand through their air They dip weave then assume in the altered brightness The places they have had, and all Their wandering. Wherever it is, It rises; The place stands up and whirls as in valleys Of Arizona where the world-armies of dust gather in sleeping Hordes. I have seen them walking Nearly out of the world on a crazed foot Spinning the ground beneath them Into chaos. These are dust devils, and in that sunny room With the shape of their motes unmassed not given a desert I have closed my eyes and changed them into forms Of fire the dying's vision Of incandescent worms: For moment After moment have lain as though whirling Toward myself from the grains of the earth in a cone 228 Of sunlight massing my forces To live in time drawn into a shape Of dust and in that place A woman Came from my spinning side. There we lay And stared at the ceiling of our house at the extra motes That danced about the raising of our hands Unable to get into a human form at this time But ready For children we might raise and call our own, Teach to sing to sweep the sills to lift their hands And make the dust dance in the air Like bodies: ready: Ready, always, for the next. Buckdancer's Choice 229 ...