China VI: Yellow Earth
Dust going round and round, a recycling of itself,spreading on roeds, covering the dead in mounds, blooming in clouds, a great desert -on-the-move to shock the megoapolis into its shrinking smallness, shunted by an army of aunts from stairwells and kitchens and deep-pored underwear, wiped up from its settling place by a billion feet and a million tyres, crushed deep into local mountains, sorted by a thousand shifting hands, tidally made and remade by an unconscious compact of wilderness and man. Making the hills hang in a haze above hemselves, aculturated mists. Unlike sea-tides, dust-tides are unpredictable, a complex fractal compact of wind and man, billowing cumuli from roads uncapped by tarmac, an oceanic Yellow sea of wiped carbon, mountain-baked silicate, particules of human flesh. Mounding up at the foot of the scarp, like a beach against a cliff.