The Age of Dust
by Evan Harrison
An absence of denial occupies
states of disrepair,
and in this,
the way the full-length mirror leans
on the drooping wood floor,
I find comfort
in the accuracy of sloped reflections.
What is outside does not feel
confined—mice nose through
separations of wall and ground,
rough holes meant to allow pipes
for gas and water. Crickets wait
through each dawn
in startling places.
No matter our revulsion,
the house breathes these things.
I can’t follow the systems of cracks
without thinking: 1907,
one arm pressed against the frame,
the carpenter stares
into trees pulsing with hot wind,
and knows the doom,
the precarious rightness of his angles
and tenuous junction of things.
He says to me in the language of sweat
and nails: build with a vision of dust, relish
a red hand.
