Entropy

The Mercy of Dust

0407.2025

Why must I root myself

in a world that let go of me?

To hunger for joy

is to drink from a cracked chalice—

each swallow a vanishing echo.

I diminish

in the hush of hours,

folding myself into invisible,

bleeding quietly

into the mortar of unseen walls.

One dusk will come

and not retreat.

It will wear no blade—

only silence,

and the low call

of something gentler than survival.

Existence is the turning of one’s face

toward the locus of decay—

and worse,

the slow burial of the heart

beneath its own debris.

I do not remember

a mouth that spoke my name

with unburned vowels.

I do not recall

a hand that stayed

after winter.

What light waits for me

that does not beg for transaction?

What word dreams of my ear

without trembling into ash?

What heart

could swallow mine

without choking?

Have I not given?

My spine?

My unspoken hourglass?

My silence, dressed in gold?

In the end, there is no architecture—

only the memory

of fingers on disappearing stone.

I will unthread into

the constellations’ breath,

into the sleep

between atoms,

into that holy remainder

no instrument can measure.

I will go

where absence cannot betray me,

where the echo does not ask

who threw the first stone.

I will go to love.

I will go

to where the dust has memory,

mercy wears no face,

and sorrow cannot follow.

m.c.f.

Original photograph, 2009 (35mm / digital) • post-processing in Adobe Photoshop • Marni Fraser