Dust

Illuminated, it powders the table,
glass bowl, old photo,
the trail where I run my finger
under the lamplight.
I have not dusted in weeks,
mea culpa.
What I have done
is dive underwater into cave eyes of
incested children
as I am licensed to do,
and open their nerves to hope, swimming
against the undertow
in miserly hour visits.

Friday night is a shipwreck.
I float on the sofa
in detritus of papers, books,
a dirty rug;
am also the wheeling albatross,
swooping down at myself,
watching her try to
spit out the stories, her mouth
gasping with water and fish.

Doesn't this life, its
orgies of mass funerals,
its dolphin leaps
of reality, shredding
everything known,
make dusting superfluous?
Deceptive in stillness,
as I swig beer, the tidal force
slaps my livingroom, its
wavetongues, shark teeth,
bursting my mind like a grape.

The plant in my front window
is dying of sticky white spots.
The spray that would save it
is pesticide, to be used,
it says on the label,
only at night with gloves, I've sat here
night after night,
afraid that to touch the cure
will loose something worse,
while all the wet shrieks of lumbered trees,
hang from my ceiling by one hook,

and nothing I could do
would be enough.

Copyright 1996 by Judy Wyatt

Valley of Saying Home Page Poems by Judy Wyatt