A Magazine of Many Arts

A gentle distortion draws me:
my voice, but deeper, a register
I recognize from wistful dreams.

As I sleepwalk the stone basin,
an elf owl yips, rousing me.
I glance back to the ridge where

friends wreath the campfire.
Exhausted by exile, my chosen tribe
sleeps dreamless as the night is moonless.

None misses me yet, so I spiral down
to search out my other voice.
Deep in want, I’m engulfed,

unaware I’ve entered the earth’s maw
until Death titters to itself
in bird and bat and lizard bone

snapped underfoot. Ahead
I sense a void but still I walk
the narrowing corridor, my elbows

scraping the earth’s craggy throat
and I wonder, When did I cover my ears?
Perhaps some counter-spell unwinds inside me,

for, fear remembered, I crouch to crawl
to the cenote’s oily-mirror edge.
I stare into the eye of the stone

eager to greet my siren self—surely taller,
broader-shouldered to shelter our deeper voice.
Instead, glaring back is the girl I almost forgot:

Limp-braided. Round-chested. Survivor.

She is the vessel of my dream.
To drown her is to doom him.
Both are equally Me.

I recoil from the cenote’s edge.
The hungry ghost churns my reflection,
raging but powerless to force sacrifice

from mere disappointment, not despair.
I flee the ravening dark, running
toward night, firelight, friends.

Up and out, I emerge
knowing the moon is not missing,
merely waiting.

The villagers, unable to tell them apart,
burned our healers and the witch
leaving no one to save us
when the Black Death finally came

Fleas mounted on rats
bent on rape and rapine
crashing through our defenses
like a stone through cathedral glass

Alone on the pyre of my wife and children
I hear their laughter and their cries
their faces surging up through the cold, gray ash
the haunting stench of good meat gone bad

You were too timorous for us,
old husk that weighed us down
like an anchor.
You cared what gossips whispered.
You stalled and repented and wept
when we would have leapt.

The scarlet silk called to you, true,
but in the end you had a grey soul
more suitable to prim pumps
or straight-laced oxfords
than for dancing slippers.
Seven-league boots would have done for us
almost as well
but you’d never have tugged them on.

Once the red shoes wrapped around us,
we knew we were meant for more
than sermons and solicitude,
cradles and kaffe-klatches.

So when you cried out to the woodcutter,
we rejoiced,
glad to be cut free of you at last.

Dance, now we dance!
Out of shadowed forests,
away from the cemeteries,
beyond the suburbs,
to crater’s rim and glacier’s hulk,
through blizzard and sirocco
to foreign cities’ din and crush.

You couldn’t grimace through the pain,
reach that place where you
forget the audience,
forget even yourself.
But we know—we know!—
we never needed you.
Pirouetting through the theatre of the world,
we are the Dance.