Dust
I
This crushed earth, nomadic particles, used to be something.
A reconstructed array of jars, puzzles made whole. They are
spirits from an afterlife, an afterimage of humankind: graves
dug up and reassembled. But now they only hold the past.
Like the ground, they break in the places where it is most
logical: fault, lines.
II
Telescopes align in concentric circles. Electrical wires crackle,
inverted trees with black, hanging roots. Territorial weeds
spread out across the landscape, hoarding their own networks
of water. Children build technology from toothpicks, making science
a playground game for connections, iterations. White spaces
succumb to warm orange spaces. Nature has its own installation
art. Advancement steals through land like this, leaving broken
shards of plasticity. Leaving misshapen metal frameworks.
Dust marks the void for progress.
III
Layers of time
march on
and leave fragments
behind
for others to put
together.
Each layer assumes a name
going forward,
technology sprung up from
man’s ribs
and got a master’s degree
to advance
its career. Civilization
carries out
Millions of deaths, flung
at the land
The organic matter decays
and the artificial
Decays too. Progress leaves
souvenirs.
IV
They whisper, “Come back to me,” as though the entirety of human civilization can stop and turn back the unidirectional arrow of time. Some do come back. They put together jars from the crumbling bits of jars; they paint them lovingly and make them lustrous. But they don’t have the originals anymore. They are working from the Form of Jar, and from there they advance into having an instantiation of a jar that, in their imagination, matches the jars they have studied from writings and seen on other jars or seen intact, and then it’s done. It will remain in this form for years, tended carefully in a garden of other re-unbroken jars, behind a wall of glass in a museum. In an art book. On jstor.
By unbreaking them, do they bind their spirits to the earth? Can their souls—yes, even the souls of jars—not march on, joining their fellows and their users? Instead, do they remain, captive organisms that never die?