Her Hoover Vortex Master hums,
the house a diary of dross,
Pop-Tart crumbs, playground grit,
wicked grains of glass
the broom did not pick up
when her boyfriend broke
a long-neck Miller Beer,
fragments of a narrative
she tracks from room to room,
cobwebs, dead bees, scented talc,
pollen shed by Easter lilies
one week past their prime,
and later when she cannot sleep,
the nightscape fills with cosmic dust
she heard Carl Sagan talk about
on the old Tonight Show,
comet ash and star-chaff
settling on her sleeping son
and on the now remembered face
of the whiskey-crippled father
she tried not to love,
how it falls, the dust of genesis,
until she falls asleep at last.

Previously published in Southern Poetry Review, 2003