Two Parts Dust Poem by Scott Eden

Two Parts Dust

Dust #1

cleaning the figurine
from the high shelf
- the Lohan -
every groove of his green wooden robe
was filled with
old dust. all gone now.

putting him back
on his high shelf
- nine years -
I see a round bowl
- nine years also -
inside, unspeakable dust

objet retrouvé,
old forgotten glasses
with heart-shaped lenses
blue beneath the dust
at midnight
staring empty years.

eyes that looked
so beautifully through them,
also gone all blue beneath the dust.
I put the glasses back
so carefully
not to disturb the perfect dust
beside the Lohan.

*****


Footnote in mid-poem:
In Theravada Buddhism, the Arhattranslated into Chinese as Lohan, is one who has followed the Eightfold Path and has achieved deliverance of this earthly existence. He has reached 'the other shore' and is saved for all eternity. In him the asavas - the craving for sensual pleasures, earthly existence, ignorance and wrong views - are gone. He is subject to no more rebirths and karma.
According to tradition, there were originally only 16 lohans. Two were added on the list by the Chinese in the Tang Dynasty.


Dust #2, Dream #1

Then in my dream
I am standing in a large room
in a house I do not know. One wall
is all windows
admitting soft grey light.
There is a small wooden cabinet
in the middle of the spacious
empty floor. On it
a turntable with a vinyl album.
The album is covered in dust.
I wonder if it will
even play. I lift the arm and
put it in the groove. It plays:
western classical music
that I unrecognise. The label
is dark glossy blue, with one word
printed. It is rotating
slowly enough to read. I lean and look.
The blue is so dark I cannot at first
make out the word, in lower case,
and black. As it it comes round again, I see it:

'Tang'.

*****

Dream #2

I am in some strange institution of art, half southern cathedral, and half farm.
I walk down corridors and generous stairways as in the Chapter House at Wells, except the stone too pale. Figures are slouching, scattered like those in Raphael's 'School of Athens'. I don't know whether I am a student
or a teacher: suddenly I am in my own huge studio
like a basilica, the pale bare stone again. I see enormous figures I
have drawn, twenty feet high, maybe with long-handled brooms,
on white unlikely paper, monolithic and all too thin, scratched in black ink, they are all poets but they have no faces. They are Ginsberg, Corso,
Dante, others. They stretch in a long line, a hundred feet.
They have empty hands and unkempt suits, even the ancients.
They have heads but no features. They are waiting for something
to happen: they are a faceless legacy but I know them well. And thus
the evening and the night, two parts dust and two parts dream.