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Dust, Campbell McGrath
Days, hours, minutes,
a hunger for the fruit of some dimly remembered past.
A man waiting for the bus with a vacuum cleaner.
Miles click by, trees, memories,
the reflective eyes of highway markers
in the darkness. The movie stops,
then starts again,
random images tumbling from the projector,
a newsreel out of control.
While crossing the reservation in Arizona a song from your childhood
comes on the radio in Navajo. The DJ’s voice and singsong elocution,
jangling banjo wires, scattered English phrases embedded like ivory stones-
computer science class, Gatorade, the Lovesick Blues.
Great Falls and Guthrie Center.
Shiloh and Antietam.
Plymourh Rock and the Grand Coulee Dam.
Whatever list we choose will be inadequate:
apples, drops of water, sunlight's
shattered prismatic radiance.
Days measured out like cornmeal, or flour,
measured out like salt.
We keep waiting for the moment when everything comes together, the
revelation on the mountaintop, when the streams and rivers rush past,
growing out of our bodies like hair, veins and arteries flowing with lambent
energy, music, a kind of noise. . . . We’re in Montana, standing and looking
up at the stars, the countless lights of the Big Sky, the vast plains rolling out
silently at our feet, the lights of the towns reflecting up from the prairie, the
secret lights, the web of roads, the whorl, the great matrix of America
revealed at last.
But it doesn’t happen that way. Instead we pick up a hitchhiker named Ray,
dirty and shirtless, tattooed, with a dog and a plastic garbage bag holding
everything he owns. Near Pocatello we pass a giant dust cloud, yellow and
red, stirred up by farm equipment, and a rainbow arches across the
highway, and the canyon of the Snake River, a rainbow in the cloud of dust.
Silt and Rifle, Cortez and Alamosa, Empire and Grand Lake:
the mountain towns of Colorado.
The names of the towns are nothing
but sand carried down on the wind.
Language itself is just dust,
crystalline particles,
a blue snow descending in silence.
We can never hope to get it all down, never more than a suggestion, an
essence, the string of pearls unwinding. The lumberjack who scales the
tallest of trees with ease but slips again and again on the greased totem-
antelope and owl, the eagle we intuitively understand to represent Myths
of the American Past-and finally stands in the mud, looking up, past the
carved pole, past the hills, to the sky, clouds moving against a depth of
unimaginable blue, beyond cerulean and indigo, too clear for words, too
pure, and feels within himself the stirring of a deep and abiding faith.
“What’s the dog's name, Ray?” He doesn’t have a name. “What do you call
him?” Dog.
Memory, love, depiction, the words themselves
deny us, slip through our hands.
We drank six kinds of malt liquor.
We ate at McDonald's four times in one day.
You can drive from D.C. to LA. in 48 hours
if you just average 60 mph, including stops.
The days retract like a telescope, images and words. The moment slips
away. It never existed. The vision on the mountaintop never happened.
The stars are only two-dimensional, etched on the ceiling. The rivers that
flowed from our bodies solidify into crowds of people pushing past, com-
muters heading home to the clustered suburbs, the towns of Connecticut
and New Jersey.
It isn’t Montana at all. It’s New York City.
I’m standing in Grand Central Station,
looking up at the vaulted roof
painted with star charts and luminous constellations:
the fish, the hunter, the great bear.
It’s Grand Central Station and the people
push around me, ambient, breaking on the rocks,
flooding the Stairways and corridors.
It’s Grand Central Station and I’m waiting for my lover,
waiting for the walk home through the hushed city,
cloaked and blanketed against winter-
snow is starting to fall, dark waves
driven down beneath the streetlights,
settling like the ash of memory.
Minutes, hours, miles, a childlike hunger for faith
The crush of humanity surrounds us,
the animate hum, the giant clock ticking off seconds
like heartbeats reverberating through an immense marble hall.
Days measured out like salt.
Measured out like gold dust.
I‘m waiting for Elizabeth.
I’m standing beneath the true American stars.
I’m looking up, in wonder.
_________________
Nothing and no one can save you! Abandon hope now! Here's what you can do :
1. Admit you are a semi-evolved ape-thing mercifully ignorant of the sanity-blasting truths of the greater cosmos.
2. Die.
3. Rot.
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