From: bunny@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Marsh)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Poem - Dust
Date: 7 Oct 92 04:06:37 GMT
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana


DUST

He drops his coat into a puddle,
no one cares that he's come home
because he's all alone inside a
stranger world than any man has
ever known (or so he fancies to
himself, a lonely man of letters
speeches prose and academia) and
likes it there, the stranger still.

Travels bore but more will follow
on the footsteps echoes of which
trace his borrowed flat revolve
around a faded, scuffed and tired
suitcase full of tired, scuffed
and faded jackets, trousers, shirts.

London rushes at a brisk pace 
stirring dust before it settles,
making him feel less at home because
his shoes are ever dusty when he
stays in one place, home (the primary
position) in the midwest, in a
four-room flat much larger than his
three-room here but smaller than the
one in Paris soon to come and dust
will settle slightly there ensconced
within protective clouds of smoke.

He sighs a little, thinks himself
a worldly man with high ideas lost
within idyllic cities, basking in
their borrowed glory just to send a
letter "home" from King's Way Road
or Rue de Saint-Martin and nevermind
that he, the traveler, has few friends
and fewer memories of the last time
ashes settled as he watched and held a
puff or two of down from someone's
sleepy, snuggled head and sipped a
fine, pale, ancient sherry.

Nevermind that books, though written,
seldom find a resting spot in someone's
hands or that the last time that his
face was framed by brown instead of grey
was sometime in the decade past and
no one in his life then is still there
now, when he could really spend a minute
spouting on the sad pollution muddying
the Thames or how he'd really like to
take time out to travel down the Rhone
and sample sweet, fresh wines or...
no one's there, no numbers in his head
but, still, he's the man who spends his
summers hiking by himself in mountains
so familiar that they've almost been a
bore the last twelve times or so; and
his are the works read avidly by other
dusty bibliophiles who haunt the fresh
young faces staffing research or the
info desk...they have no lives, poor souls.

He stretches and discards his jacket
briefly yawns then shakes his head to clear
away the cobwebs, shrugs his shoulders
sheds his dustless shoes and wonders if
he truly is as queer a man as all those
younger than himself (and sometimes older)
seem to think...then smiles, shakes his
head again to clear the non-dust lingering
there and chooses from his shining pile
three of the best fin-de-siecle monographs
that he could find on themes of madness
in the works of Mallarme and Baudelaire.

He nods off, weary, after hours of diligence
for king and country, future scholars,
wholesale greatness after death, a posthumous
tribute waiting there for him just like
these other authors, books in shadows,
dust-jackets dust-free like his shoes with
many tomes in many cities, libraries his
sullen home in memorium in the midwest,
London, Paris, Rome and all the things he
dreamt of when he started on this odyssey
but no one cares about the man behind the books
or that his greying hair has gone to dust.

-Tracy Flynn-Marsh