The Dust That the Poet Exposes

Images of dust appear throughout my poems, and I often wonder why it is a symbol I love to repurpose in each poem. Then, my brain comes to life, and I realize that T.S. Eliot, my favorite poet, wrote my favorite line of poetry: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” That is the epigraph of my first book, A Consecration of the Wind, but until this very moment, I did not make the connection between my use of the symbol and Eliot’s use of it in that line from “The Burial of the Dead,” the first section of “The Wasteland.”

As an Eliot aficionado, I have been drawn to the power of single words and images from his work, and I’ve used them as inspiration in my own poetry. His hands that raised “dingy shades/In a thousand furnished rooms” in “Preludes” inspired the following lines from my poem, “Twilight Windows,” whose narrator stands by “dusty sills.”

Brows that lean from windows
Are cast in wonder inside
A thousand lonely rooms.

In the last stanza of that poem, dust takes on another form, creating a force field that enfolds and almost smothers the narrator:

Lint drifts from her
As light traces the pattern
In the air that swirls
Her in a raptureless cocoon.

In my second manuscript, Fragmented Roots, the concept of dust appears over ten times, and becomes a fluid symbol. In “The Dust That Sunlight Exposes,” dust represents fragments of memories and experiences that comprise us, define us, and confine us:

I must keep walking
To know what it is
I want to snatch
From the sunlit air,
Hoping it is not just
The dust of days wearily lived.

In the poem “Place Card,” dust becomes part of my DNA that attaches to other people’s DNA, establishing a relationship forged by fate or happenstance.

How do people’s folds overlap?
How do the interstitial spaces inside
Us find ways of exploding and
Sending particles onto others?

Happenstance? Fate?
Or am I a speck of dust
Floating in the atmosphere
Adhering to anyone
Who is breathing in
At the very moment
I am breathing out?

I am indebted to T.S. Eliot for instilling in me a deep love of poetry and an appreciation for how simple words may be transformed into powerful images.