Saturday Night

Music is most sovereign because more than anything else, rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace. —Plato, The Republic The cranes are flying ... —Chekhov And here it comes: around the world, In Chicago, Petersburg, Tokyo, the dancers Hit the floor running (the communal dancefloor Here, there, at intervals, sometimes paved, Sometimes rotted linoleum awash in beer, Sometimes a field across which the dancers streak Like violets across grass, sometimes packed dirt In a township of corrugated metal roofs) And what was once prescribed ritual, the profuse Strains of premeditated art, is now improvisation, The desperately new, where to the sine-curved Yelps and spasms of police sirens outside The club, a spasmodic feedback ululates The death and cremation of history, Until a boy whose hair is purple spikes, And a girl wearing a skull That wants to say I’m cool but I’m in pain, Get up and dance together, sort of, age thirteen. Young allegorists, they’ll mime motions Of shootouts, of tortured ones in basements, Of cold insinuations before sex Between enemies, the jubilance of the criminal. The girl tosses her head and dances The shoplifter’s meanness and self-betrayal For a pair of stockings, a scarf, a perfume, The boy dances stealing the truck, Shooting his father. The point is to become a flying viper, A diving vulva, the great point Is experiment, like pollen flinging itself Into far other habitats, or seed That travels a migrant bird’s gut To be shit overseas. The creatures gamble on the whirl of life And every adolescent body hot Enough to sweat it out on the dance floor Is a laboratory: maybe this lipstick, these boots, These jeans, these earrings, maybe if I flip My hair and vibrate my pelvis Exactly synched to the band’s wildfire noise That imitates history’s catastrophe Nuke for nuke, maybe I’ll survive, Maybe we’ll all survive. . . . At the intersection of poverty and plague The planet's children—brave, uncontrollable, juiced Out of their gourds—invent the sacred dance.