7 dances for yours

the breeze, when it comes, arrives warm and damp.
it tangles itself into my hair and then rests,
with a weight like a cat, on my bare skin.

I am drunk on the hours that we've danced in that silent way we do,
saying only what is most true.
In that way you stood and swayed,
like a great and old tree,
I learned something more about what tethers us to this stark and effortless moment.
In your struggle to be free,
your hands held hard away from your shoulders,
I am brought to my own fierce grace
and what it takes to listen,
with impossible attention,
to what calls us home.

We are single suns in some vast sphere of a bigger sun,
and we do what we know to do to keep rising and setting on the watery edge of our given days.

In some old and future song, these verses sung tonight are still shimmering in the dreamtime.
There is a labyrinth of angled stones,
a grey sky and
a waterfilled net of fish.
There is a low and cavernous howl that comes sweeping like a flurry of a thousand birds, winging through a lost alleyway,
too thin for all their furious songs,
too sad for all their sudden light. 

Waves begin in the belly of the sea and they climb, clamor and collapse at the delicate hem of the ocean's dress, touching the shore.

We are counted among the blessed. 
Our hands speak, our backs curve
and we bend by the wind with feline resiliency.
Moving with the lightness of wit, a leap resembles rest
and surprises arrive as an instant of furious play.

We hold hands in this common space of grief and beauty.
We are thin, silk threads, so rough and ready, spun soft and strong.
Surrounded and filled with unfathomable vastness, the mystery races after us.
The storehouse of myth and metaphor swings open its doors and
we brave the rushing to the meaning of it all.


in dedication to leon