Particulate Matter

[Ruth]

A wonderfully heartbreaking and timely poem by my friend Molly Fisk.

PARTICULATE MATTER

If all you counted were tires on the cars left in driveways and stranded beside the roads.
Melted dashboards and tail lights, oil pans, gas tanks, window glass, seat belt clasps.
The propane tanks in everyone’s yards, though we didn’t hear them explode.

R-13 insulation. Paint, inside and out. The liquor store’s plastic letters in puddled
colors below their charred sign. Each man-made sole of every shoe in all those closets.
The laundromat’s washers’ round metal doors.

But then Arco, Safeway, Walgreens, the library — everything they contained.
How many miles of electrical wire and PVC pipe swirling into the once-blue sky:
how many linoleum acres? Not to mention the valley oaks, the ponderosas, all the wild

hearts and all the tame, their bark and leaves and hooves and hair and bones, their final
cries, and our neighbors: so many particular, precious, irreplaceable lives that despite
ourselves we’re inhaling.

—from Rattle’s Poets Respond
November 25, 2018

[Sharon]

It's beautiful and powerful.

[Doug]

Why?

[Ruth]

Doug wrote: "Why?"

What are you asking?

[Doug]

It leaves me depressed.

[Ruth]

Of course. Don’t you think there’s a place for tragedy in literature?

[Doug]

I certainly do.
I am not critiquing the poem's power and content. It is great.
The tragedy it disgorges is unusual.
It created the question
I was left with.
Can't help it.
Sort of like: Why do bad things happen to good people?

[Ruth]

Oh. Now I understand what you meant.

[Doug]

L O L