particles of sun and pollen/more Brenda Hillman

i was sitting in a shaft of sunlight, looking out the big windows and the open door, and i watched all these motes of dust shining in the air, carried by the wind, and it was so beautiful... and then i realized it was the very same dust and pollen coating the city for the past week, making us all sick. but it made me think of this poem, too:

from Dark Matter —

I want to see everything but they say now
most of the universe is hidden;
they call what we can't see dark matter,
those particles straining unprovenly through
what is, sucking gravity from the edge
of galaxies. They're trying to find just one
speck of it . . . Why am I thrilled by the idea
that this hurried thing cannot be caught?
That this huge mountain's filled with it,
billions of it going through me every second.
That as I sit on this log, slightly drunk
from the high altitude, that
I'm being hit with it. Why love the thought
of being struck by a dark thing clean through.
That the little family throwing snow now
in their innocent ways are being penetrated
by an opposite, the main universe, a huge
allegorical black urgency—and we are nothing
but a rind of consciousness, a mild
excess, a little spare color, and not just us,
the thistles and the asters and the blackbirds . . .

Of course this happened at the start of time,
something had to pull away, and I've been trying
to love the missingness in the middle


—Brenda Hillman, Bright Existence