26 Dance poems

It’s not solely the dance of the juggler but his spirit: with its turkey wings, perfect thighs, sensuous hips, large round flat eye. This eye smiles like lips. Watch this eye— it’s not a donkey eye. It’s not solely the dancer who moves like a circus animal as though to children’s music—no, it’s the girl in the swing’s rhythm, the ticking of the clock at night, the strut of the cock, the flight of the holy family to the remains. The nipple that feeds the infant is an eye looking into his future. It’s not even the village square with its musicians and happy faces that makes the difference—no, because if it were, weddings with violins, harps, flutes would have settled the question: no, it is the rising and lifting, the failing and catching of that unknown sense of self before it crashes, that matters.

Who was the woman who lived in the kingdom behind the barrier. There are those who will tell you she was the wife of every man in the village. And one night while her husbands were finishing their day at the gasworks, the woman was boiling oats for her only child, a young girl who’d amassed a beautiful collection of spoons in her life, each one given to her by one of her mother’s husbands. And this same night the young daughter died. And the woman buried the daughter with her spoons in her pockets. Come daybreak the hostiles appeared at the barrier with ice in their beards. “To hell with Pax Americana,” they said. And they camped outside the wall that night chanting war cries. You say you want to know the names of the war cries that survived history. “Wheel the gun carriages up to the barrier of the empire of husbands.” “Our first word is ruin and our next word is value.” There are those who will tell you the hostiles carried on like this for some weeks. Until one night the dead daughter led them behind the barrier, through a tunnel she’d dug in the earth with her spoons. It was thus the hostiles made it their business to burn everything. They burned the village crops and the distillery. They burned the apothecary, the potash mine. Black soot fell on the livery and they burned the livery too. And there’s another war cry that’s since survived history: “Tonight like god’s scalp in your kingdom behind the barrier our burning makes snow and ends nowhere.” You say, where were the village husbands while all of this was 
happening. There are those who will tell you they were working their jobs at the gasworks, and when they heard the bullhorn roar in the watchtower they were smoking cigarillos and pacing the floor of the gasworks. And the roar of the bullhorn had a strange effect on the husbands, who each began daydreaming of his wife at home in the village. The first husband thought: “The taste of the breath of my wife, it’s like saying the word houndstooth to myself in the dark.” The next husband thought of her letting her hair down in front of a vanity, and smearing her blue eye shadow onto her fingers, and plucking the stray hairs and flyaways off her head. The next husband thought of her saying, “I’m correcting god’s blunders,” when he asked her why she wears all this foundation on her face. Another husband thought: “Quitting time is worthless to me so long as the work I do in the gasworks makes me think of my wife’s jawbone.” And all together the husbands said: “The jawbones of my wife, they beat both the same, like when I watch a train leave the 
kingdom, and all I can see is the pistons beating away in the smoke.” And when the hostiles entered the gasworks the husbands were dancing. And you say you want to know the words the hostiles spoke when they entered. There are those who will tell you they said this: “Don’t quit dancing.” “There’s a penalty for an empire that believes it can survive itself,” they said. And so they pointed their war clubs at the husbands, and they said don’t quit, don’t quit dancing on the floor of the gasworks, and they bludgeoned to death the husbands who refused to keep dancing, and one by one the husbands fell dead on the floor of the gasworks, each one dancing himself to death at the hands of the hostiles. And this dancing took many deaths. But you say where was the wife who lost all her husbands this day. There are those who will tell you she was hiding the last of the cheese in a boot. She was rolling up the deed to her house in the village. She was picking up her daughter’s violin and stuffing the scroll in the violin’s f-hole. She was fleeing for the wall when she was stopped by the hostiles. Dance, said the hostiles, and they pointed their war clubs at her skull. And these war clubs had a strange effect on the wife, who began daydreaming about a man who wasn’t her husband. She thought of cutting his hair in a sunflower patch in the village. The time should be dusk, she thought, and the shears, they should flash once in her hands like a scythe. She thought there should be two swarms of no-see-ums, one smoldering around each of her hands. And she’d tilt back the head of the man who wasn’t her husband. And she’d oil his throat with the badger brush in her hand. And he’d smell the sandalwood lather she worked in the bristles. And he’d smell the eau de cologne on her neck when she leaned in close. And she’d shave his throat with the blade of a balisong. And the woman thought each time he moaned when she stroked him a dragonfly should dance from his mouth. And he’ll moan until the dragonfly quits dancing, she thought. And I’ll dance around his throat all night like a lantern. “Because a war club doesn’t taste like a war club,” she said. “It tastes like my husbands all breathing at once.” She spoke these words with a hole in her skull in the snow. And the smoke coming out of the hole was her thoughts. And her body lying there in the village square was so beautiful the hostiles began to dance on either side of the body. And they danced, and they danced, until they too fell dead in the snow beside her.

Question: Can you tell us about what he is wearing? Well, the hooves represent the deer’s hooves, the red scarf represents the flowers from which he ate, the shawl is for skin. The cocoons make the sound of the deer walking on leaves and grass. Listen. Question: What is that he is beating on? It’s a gourd drum. The drum represents the heartbeat of the deer. Listen. When the drum beats, it brings the deer to life. We believe the water the drum sits in is holy. It is life. Go ahead, touch it. Bless yourself with it. It is holy. You are safe now. Question: How does the boy become a dancer? He just knows. His mother said he had dreams when he was just a little boy. You know how that happens. He just had it in him. Then he started working with older men who taught him how to dance. He has made many sacrifices for his dancing even for just a young boy. The people concur, “Yes, you can see it in his face.” Question: What do they do with the money we throw them? Oh, they just split it among the singers and dancer. They will probably take the boy to McDonald’s for a burger and fries. The men will probably have a cold one. It’s hot today, you know.

in the blackest recesses of Bistro Malatesta entre les heures du quatre à cinq (forgoing his liaison with Odette for the third time in as many days) Prudhomme observes a snailfish undulating round the hat stand’s spine, the stalagmites of candles (its sad, small eyes, its cryptic lack of scales) wants to cleave to it wants to shake the dipsomaniac in the corner, hiss Ay caramba! Have you seen it? Here on the Rue Mouffetard — so far from deep-sea canyons, so far from home? considers eating it flavored with rosemary, flavored with dill whiskery thing sees it, loses it in Gauloise furls, catches it again, its curl/uncurl progression along a velveteen banquette it stirs him — its decision in oblivion to be a thing of  light and so gelatinous thinks of turtles nibbled at by surgeonfish wonders if perhaps he’s lost his grip, and if  he has, likes it

The lights in the theater fail. The long racks Of costumes abandoned by the other dancers Trouble Celeste. The conductor asks If she is sad because autumn is coming on, But when autumn comes she is merely pregnant and bored. On her way back from the holidays, a man Who appears to have no face rattles the door To her compartment.How disgusting, she thinks; How disgusting it always must be to grow old. Dusk falls, and a few drops of rain. On the train window trembles the blurred Reflection of her own transparent beauty, And through this, beautiful ruined cities passing, Dark forests, and people everywhere Pacing on lighted platforms, some Beating their children, some apparently dancing. The costumes of the dancers sway in the chill darkness. Now sinking into sleep is like sinking again Into the lake of her youth. Her parents Lean from the rail of a ferryboat waving, waving, As the boat glides farther out across the waves. No one, it seems, is meeting her at the station. The city is frozen. She warms herself In the pink and scented twilight of a bar. The waiter who serves her is young. She nods assent. The conversation dies in bed. Later, She hurries off to rehearsal. In the lobby, Dizzy still with the weight of her own body, She waits, surrounded by huge stills of herself And bright posters announcing events to come. Her life—she feels it closing about her now Like a small theater, empty, without lights.

The dance shoes, seduction and coercion, owned by male feet, roam floors that beg for chandeliers. In search of flat-footed beauty and a bed, where ever they might be, the handsome conversation attracts female followers trading on the smiles of curves. The next steps are dizzying and leave dresses dipped and hung over with a purse and heart opened at their tops. The wallflowers can't say when the tango with the rag doll began, but witnesses toasted a conga line of would-be brides that transcend a retirement community in Florida, each giving up their precious moments on Earth to fandango's flimflam.

for Leela Samson Spaces in the electric air divide themselves in circular rhythms, as the slender grace of your arms and bell-tied ankles describe a geometric topography, real, cosmic, one that once reverberated continually in a prescribed courtyard of an ancient temple in South India. As your eyelids flit and flirt, and match the subtle abhinaya in a flutter of eye-lashes, the pupils create an unusual focus, a sight only ciliary muscles blessed and cloaked in celestial kaajal could possibly enact. The raw brightness of kanjeevaram silk, of your breath, and the nobility of antique silver adorns you and your dance, reminding us of the treasure chest that is only half-exposed, disclosed just enough, barely — for art in its purest form never reveals all. Even after the arc-lights have long faded, the audience, now invisible, have stayed over. Here, I can still see your pirouettes, frozen as time-lapse exposures, feel the murmuring shadow of an accompanist’s intricate raag in this theatre of darkness, a darkness where oblique memories of my quiet Kalakshetra days filter, matching your very own of another time, where darkness itself is sleeping light, light that merges, reshapes, and ignites, dancing delicately in the half-light. But it is this sacred darkness that endures, melting light with desire, desire that simmers and sparks the radiance of your quiet femininity, as the female dancer now illuminates everything visible: clear, poetic, passionate, and ice-pure.

Ten thousand women and I the only one in boots Life’s dance: they meet he holds her leg up

Nikita zips across stage Trailed by a troop of white-gloved One-wheelers: Killer Joes, The 12 & Under Crew In disguise. A sixth sense guides him Beyond darkness. An Inner voice says when, Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop, I’ll tell you when

Look straight, and don’t tremble, wreckage of my hanged race: a sarabande dancer, Japanese muslin tight on her live-wire hips arrives with the moonlight, fast as the tam-tam drums. She’ll take you to the grand esplanade where the gallows tell your story, tell of your dim bronze halos licked away by a pale man’s greed. Leave your gallows tears behind, the long-drawn vowels of the lost names of flowers, the long-drawn cries of your burden of grain, the long-drawn cries of your burden of seed-pods, and the long-drawn cries of the seed-pods cut and hung. Shipwreck of my race, twisted in the wind-rush, fall from your broken gallows, wrack, wreck, and driftwood, my bloodied race. My bloodied race fearful, scab-dried, sterile, paralyzed, the low-caste wallflowers trembling at a ball for mice— no. Leave your gallows, there, those: the gallows of time-gone-by. Lift your chestnut-dark and heavy limbs, up from out the shipwreck’s carnage, and up through those long blue-green rolling waves. Sing the wind’s songs, and collect what’s needed, drop by shivering drop, in this, your Lenten fasting, in this, your sorcerer’s midnight, under this, the whip. Leave the gallows, the sap of its cut-wood spits on your skin. You’d hang there, yourself in effigy? No. Live sap runs in the driftwood branch. You’ll play, gentle, a light wind in the shimmering green of a dancer’s beaded muslin skirt, and your broken music will move in the foolish grass that still believes in death— leave your gallows-bones there, in the fool’s green shroud . . . Scratch with the rusted nail of melody, because you live, wreckage of my race, the sky will not forget you, nor the graveyard’s earth, fertile and walled. Your blood still dances, a wreckage of joy, joy soured, obstinate joy, wild and unbroken, shipwreck of my race, sarabande.