Grace Fryberger

Dirt                                                                                                                                                                        

 

Walked on, flown above, fought over, buried in, dust to dust.

 

Of thin mica flakes, mites, leaf litter, bark and other

brute matter shredded bare, shriveled down.

 

Filtered in, settled among, discrete micro-muck aligns.

Persistent and under pressure, heat, wind-whipped.                                      

 

Creation. Funnel Cloud. Sandstorm. Haboob. Earthquake

Avalanche. Volcano. Chaos into fertile novelties.

 

It’s drunk-sunk in oceans, or specks of it fly

into the eyes of woodland birds—

 

then gripped in claw, picked clean by raptors and later

ore-laden feces shower down like sparklers on the Fourth.

 

It’s in currents sweeping out, adrift against an orange sky.

Its diaspora a fine veil of silt, flutters down.

 

Gasped into my cup, it swims through my liver

or lies dry-crusted in the mouths of the fallen.

 

The rest wafts back to ground.

 

Here, gathered among its own

like a dark upheaval under the stampede of wildebeests—

 

It will again be airborne, mutable, emergent.

 

 

 

Grace Fryberger lives in Tucson, Arizona. Semi-retired, she is employed by the University

of Arizona in the College of Medicine. Her poems have appeared in such journals as

Unstrung, Ohio Poetry Review, Blue Guitar, Arizona State Poetry Society, Book

of Matches and the Medical Literary Journal for University of Virginia.