Dancers Exercising

Frame within frame, the evolving conversation is dancelike, as though two could play at improvising snowflakes’ six-feather-vaned evanescence, no two ever alike. All process and no arrival: the happier we are, the less there is for memory to take hold of, or—memory being so largely a predilection for the exceptional—come to a halt in front of. But finding, one evening on a street not quite familiar, inside a gated November-sodden garden, a building of uncertain provenance, peering into whose vestibule we were arrested—a frame within a frame, a lozenge of impeccable clarity— by the reflection, no, not of our two selves, but of dancers exercising in a mirror, at the center of that clarity, what we saw was not stillness but movement: the perfection of memory consisting, it would seem, in the never-to-be-completed. We saw them mirroring themselves, never guessing the vestibule that defined them, frame within frame, contained two other mirrors.