David Tucker

A slow news day, but I did like the obit about the butcher who kept the same store for fifty years.   People remembered when his street was sweetly roaring, aproned with flower stalls and fish stands. The stock market wandered, spooked by presidential winks, by micro-winds and the shadows of earnings.   News was stationed around the horizon, ready as summer clouds to thunder-- but it moved off and we covered the committee meeting at the back of the statehouse, sat around on our desks, then went home early.   The birds were still singing, the sun just going down.   Working these long hours, you forget how beautiful the early evening can be, the big houses like ships turning into the night, their rooms piled high with silence.

Class is over, the teacher and the pianist gone, but one dancer in a pale blue leotard stays to practice alone without music, turning grand jetes through the haze of late afternoon. Her eyes are focused on the balancing point no one else sees as she spins in this quiet made of mirrors and light— a blue rose on a nail— then stops and lifts her arms in an oval pause and leans out a little more, a little more, there, in slow motion upon the air.