page 208

Jo Thorpe

The Dance Writer's Dilemma

I could say, how this music holds the tender, extended leg
like speech in the silence of the night

or these arms, how their curve reveals unseen frescoes
on the private walls of the skull

I might speak of her stormy hand (she is not just sitting on a
verandah)

or her flexed foot,
the hunched, vivid cave of her chest—
how it enters the very verb of us

I might speak of his leap, how it makes no sound,
is succeeded by another as in a buoyant, bright defiance

I could say of these forms as they're swimming by—
them not withholding themselves
but flinging their songs to the highest gods—

Promethean Fire, Heretic, Aureole, Jeux

I might conjure a bugle in his stylised march
a fever in her fall

the drop returning me
to the cloddish earth (like a thing wrung out)

to the flawed folk.

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I might say, 'in the mountain a cry was heard'
as she spins from his grasp

Or 'vast, timeless core'

But even then, yet
will I still not be close

to the thing—

which has nothing to do with epitaph.
Which has nothing to do    with stone.

I just know I walk differently
               out   into   air
because of what dance does sometimes.