powder pother smother coomb
breeze cully slack culm
ashes pouce loess pollen
pounce vapour smoke

He lies in bed on a late Sunday morning gazing up at the shafts of light that pierce his slatted blinds, watching the swarm of dust motes wheel and bob on invisible currents like tiny fish swimming through a sea of light. The air in front of his window is filled to overflowing, as many motes as there are stars in the sky. He wonders if the particles are drawn from the darkness into the bright light, like moths to a flame? Or if his entire house — every room, every bit of seemingly empty space — is brimming with hidden, dancing particles only revealed in sudden light? He lies in bed all morning worrying through these questions, these mysteries.

minute particles slowly settling
suspended by slight currents
floating silently
through still air

He sees himself as an alchemist, a modern-day Paracelsus. His laboratory is the air; his philosopher's stone, the infinitesimal particles that fill it. He prepares a poultice to help him see those particles. Soaks a square of chamois cloth in a tincture of asafoetida, cayenne, and mincemeat, and places it over his open eyes. It burns terribly, but the burning is good. For several hours, the world is dark. But then, when the burning stops, he begins, as if for the first time, to see. The air is alive, brimming, a blizzard of zigzagging atoms. Gradually, each assumes a unique identity, a characteristic contour and hue and moment. A sea of undifferentiated faces becomes a group of individual entities, each alive and purposeful.

winds blowing over dry earth
dirt lint soil sand
cinders grime soot
salt spray
silica

He locks himself in his room, lies down, and watches the miraculous dance. Watches the particles rise and fall and slide and wheel and swoop and coast and hover. There is no time, only motion and multitude. He had thought the dance random, leaves blown by chance currents of air. But now he sees patterns, intentionality ... formations that come together, move in tandem, then break apart. He infers a structural integrity, an intelligence. Are these seemingly separate, haphazard motes the corpuscles of some huge, unseen organism? Do obscure creatures live among us, diaphanous bodies composed of lint and pollen and loess and ashes and soot and silica and discarded particles of our own human skin?

fine dry particles of matter
clouds of powdered earth
haze mist umbra brume
the mortal body of man

His world is filled, an unending dance of motion and sound. Everywhere he looks, he sees; everywhere he listens, he hears. There is no empty space, no silence. Never was. Only empty eyes, blind ears. He sees the cloud of dust that envelops us and the slow film that settles over all material objects as the tissue of a vast being that dwells among us and through us and within us. Dust is the past, that which has been shed; dust is the present, that which is now; dust is the future, that to which we shall one day return. Death in life; life in death. The profound Mystery, the bleeding Rose, the divine Magisterium, the quavering Egg!

house moss
wind flakes
mormon rain
devil's snow