From the Dust Returned

Sunsets are loved because they vanish. Flowers are loved because they go. The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart. These are not the sole reasons, but at the heart of morning welcomes and afternoon laughters is the promise of farewell. In the gray muzzle of an old dog we see goodbye. In the tired face of an old friend we read long journeys beyond returns.

Her cheeks glowed with pink charcoals.

In your life, did you know enthusiasm?' If the answer is yes you enter the sky. If no, you fall to burn in the pit.

The cat came first, in order to be absolute first. It arrived when all the cribs and closets and cellar bins and attic hang-spaces still needed October wings, autumn breathings, and fiery eyes.

In the attic where the rain touched the roof softly on spring days and where you could feel the mantle of snow outside, a few inches away, on December nights, A Thousand Times Great Grandmère existed. She did not live, nor was she eternally dead, she … existed.

You who walk the earth know only the moment, which is whisked away with your next exhalation.

She laid a hand on his face. “Son,” she said. “We love you. We all love you. No matter how different you are, no matter if you leave us one day.” She kissed his cheek. “And if and when you die your bones will lie undisturbed, we’ll see to that, you’ll lie at ease forever, and I’ll come see you every All Hallows’ Eve and tuck you in more secure.

The small voice that asks of the dead who arrive for admission at the gate of paradise: ‘In your life, did you know enthusiasm?’ If the answer is yes you enter the sky. If no, you fall to burn in the pit.

No one ever imagined or could figure how the ghastly passenger survived and made it across the world to October Country, upper Illinois. It was only guessed that perhaps somehow he prolonged himself in deserted abbeys and empty churches and lost graveyards of Scotland and England and finally sailed across in a ghost ship to land in Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, and somehow threaded his way among the forest, across the country, to finally arrive in upper Illinois.

When autumn trees shower bullions are we that Midas stuff, a leaf-fall that sounds the air in crisp syllables? What, what, oh what are we?

Are we kin to autumn rains? Do we rise in mists from wetland moors? Do twighlight fogs seem similar? Do we prowl or run or lope? Are we shadows on a ruined wall? Are we dusts shaken in sneezes from angel tombstones with broken wings? Do we hover or fly or writhe in October ectoplasms? Are we footsteps heard to waken us and bump our skulls on nailed-shut lids? Are we batwing heartbeats held in claw or hand or teeth?