DUST TO DUST

1 1 2 Y D U S T T O D U S T D A V I D W A G O N E R It gets left behind, put up in pots and jars routinely or is mournfully spread around in memorable places like old haunts or out of the shock-proof windows of airplanes or given back to the sea, but mostly it goes up in smoke, which doesn’t just hang there. It’s redistributed free of charge by the Law of the Di√usion of Gases all over the world, and so does every breath each creature withdraws from the general fund of what seems breathable and returns to circulation immediately. A physicist told me once, the molecules of carbon dioxide alone, not to mention oxygen, in each of our breaths contain one or more of those uttered by Julius Caesar when he murmured Et tu, Brute way back when. But dust isn’t merely the bad, last loose end of organic matter. It collaborates with the other inorganic members of its tribe – what’s left of rocks and stones when they’re ground down by upheavals and the disturbed behavior of the earth, again and again, blown this way and that, up and around and inevitably, thinned out like the last gasp of Caesar everywhere over the planet, which is still breathing for god knows what reason. Without them, 1 1 3 R without those particles, we’d have no clouds, no way for water to rise, travel, and fall, no rain, no life. We’d die. We’d never be born, let alone reborn, no matter whose breath was blown against old matter to quicken us. ...