Contradance
The frame for a large poster reproduction
we stowed in the car, then entered the pub, the waitress
asking about your Reiki book, she too a
practitioner. The journalistic poem
cannot afford to inquire into its status
because it can aspire to be no more
than it is. But the diagrams in there
show sunlight between the opposed palms yarning
to skeins, balling to an accordion,
then stringing out genetically in mitosis
otherwise unseen. Our dishes served,
her hands beside them conjured the auto wreck
that broke the bones in her feet, arms, and face,
intact black Irish lissomness describing
how her mother gave her Reiki through the casts.
Sealing the dancer into the big frame
I cracked one corner of the glass, a slash
barely visible across her earth floor.
The enlarged notations of the researcher
who did the watercolor stream around
Etruscan motion, the chiton and skirt
filmy white, its red rings gauzing her skin
which he remarks is rather clearer than
that of the men painted in the same tomb,
Solo le bande tre Rossa, only
her three forearm bracelets red: technical
notations for the lithographer
who would never see the fresco. Thin lines
of each limb through camisole and skirt, arm
arching above her raised face, one foot toeing
outward and down in a low dandled kick.
Fingering the faint green slice across that glass
I realized I never would have guessed
the mended breakage in that girl’s face though
I knew too she could not have taken in
the radiance from it as she spoke. We are not
allowed to observe our own holiness.
