Thursday, October 9, 2014

Christina


We picked up where we had left off.
I was walking past and I was late.
Kyra was in the doorway, you were inside.
The least I could do was say hello.
Or was it the most I would do?

You might have been washing something with a rag.
And I was nearly back out the door,
and I remembered in an instant
where we’d been a moment ago, just the evening before.

You were dancing with a broom.
Were you wearing your gray boots?
Your tights were maroon, or where they mauve?
I asked you quite briskly
and you answered as if you’d been thinking
about the very question that was in my mind.

You would be dancing at the Chateau
with the drag queens, I can’t be expected
to remember everything but your face.
I could see that you would be dancing in your face
and your body language surely agreed.

And then I asked again today, as I paused,
because I wanted to know,
did you go dancing after you closed
last night after all?

And you held out your hands,
at the ends of your arms,
they were both marked
and your face sparkled like rubies
or maybe colored glass.

And happy, I turned,
and hurried to my thing,
and all was more than I expected –
and less, and so it seemed
I should stop on my way back.

I walked through the door.
I think you again held the broom in your hands,
I couldn’t read in your eyes
what you were thinking,
but I saw them as you stepped towards me
and then so gracefully past me,
you stepped past my right shoulder.

I was sorely disappointed
that there were no more brownies,
I had been thinking of yesterday’s
bowl of ganache.
But you were kind and warmed up a muffin,
it was chocolate – you gave me ice water
in a glass as I had asked.

I didn’t need to watch you sweeping
across the dirty hardwood floor,
I mostly didn’t, you were in some thought,
it seemed from my glance
you were still thinking
of the dance.

I am almost sure you were wearing your gray boots
at the ends of your slender legs.
I would have watched you dancing the night before last
and maybe I did.

Your steps more quiet and surely,
more lively than I could imagine,
but I do, all the time,
and not only about you
and those two paired gray boots,
and what in your face I am looking for.
Perhaps you would be surprised,
to see what I feel inside.

I cannot go slowly enough,
and the time hastens on.

So there was something in her soft cheek
and then under his bald head at the thing,
that I was in time to see after all.
Then after you were there,
the night I had walked was so fair,
I rhymed but a little
and noted something quite else,
that I saw you dancing,
in my measured plodding mind.

Of course, that is only an expression,
hiding the truth,
while showing another,
but the  truth is lacking in color
what the ice water is lacking in flavor.
And we feel we are all doing something
at the ends of our dancing legs.

The coda awaits.
I’ve been waiting all week for tomorrow.
It’s tonight now, after all.
I will be hiding in plain sight
on the sidewalk.
And you will be frozen in place.
You’re face will be painted white
and you shall not speak a word,
but everything you love
shall be revealed.

I should stop,
but I am in a hurry.
There’s a thing
and yet your face
is watching me, but not as much as we think,
there is more and less there too,
and our body language sometimes lies.

We know, really we guess,
and our eyes touch
and look away,
already we are ahead of our time
and behind.

But we are not always
and we are not never,
We have moments when our
feet and our eyes are in time.
 



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