IN SUCH clarity of light there has to be its opposite. Something that smears, stains, drops a shroud and forms a film across the eye. When the wind is up, the season dry, the world turns upside down: the sky becomes the earth, particular and grey, and you breathe it in. You can get lost in dust as in a blizzard. You need a rope to make it from the house to the barn and back again. Dust settles on dugouts and sloughs, on drifts of snow, on the yellow of canola, on the siding of houses, on washing hung on the line. It rises in small asthmatic clouds as your feet hit the ground. It insinuates itself under the thickest hair, forms a thin cap that hugs your skull, a caul for the dying. It thickens your spit, it tucks between your fingers and toes, it sifts through the shell of an egg. Here’s dust in your eye and ashes to ashes. It is the bride’s veil and the widow’s, the skin between this world and the next. It is the smell you love most, the one that means home to you, dust on the grass as it meets the first drops of summer rain.