Poem: "Punctured"

*

In church a human sound
came from
behind
him -- but there was no one behind him.

At the dance concert
the curtain never rose
but the entire stage was punctured
by a colored gas.

He held onto his chair
edge
out of fear
that he would fall onto the stage.

The dance circled
even behind his heart.
It swelled
and was rhythmically punctured --

like a something between
our death and us --
the dance lay not out front but in
the body breathed and was.

And I must be a part of this
forever he thought.
The soft gas caressed his face
and caught

his will up in its substance.
We make a community or a complete
world not just an audience.
When it ended he couldn't back out,

but followed
the dancer who looked most like
him down a still stage-feeling road
into a dream-cafe picturesque and frantic

with the need for art,
the abiding need
to speak it touch it enter it
be part of it and in that way abide,

despite Fashion that malevolent
god of fear strutting the aisle
trying to make us feel insignificant
drab and small.

Immune the dancer pulsed as if
awkwardly
with an almost corny declarative
right-now vibrancy.

I want to be
you, the spectator
said -- I mean completely
to be your

image witness lover
participant
closer than the mirror
image is to the person in it.

There is a gold tattoo
of grace carved across our multiverse,
with little characters in Hebrew
that cover our suicide scars.

If I could only get
closer to you
than that tattoo or than the inner side of that
tattoo.

Around them the cafe
throbbed with the displacement
of those who moved away
and those who stood their ground

coming back night after night --
menus slapped on
tables -- diners who when they sat
down could barely get up again --

liaisons that somehow ended
before dessert -- there were
marriages that lived and died
quickly or tried for forever.

Life was like an ode
to transience
embedded
in dance.

Lover and lover
stood on each side
of the mirror
distinct and united

inside the bright vitality
of other pass-
ersby
etched in glass.

Sometimes bodies contain such
a strangeness that when 2
of them touch
that touch dissolves and passes through --

an interaction occurs
but is so abstract
that the loneliness mirrors
itself and remains intact.

Goodbye goodbye
to our intense
reciprocity --
what we felt inside our dance.

Outside our protected
space a still unnamed disease
stood
waiting for us

to pause and it said honey
whether
quickly
or not -- wherever you are

I will find you and eat
you and afterwards take
Africa the whole of it
into my mouth as a snack.

People paused when they heard that voice
and they grew self-
conscious
held their breath and marched into the wall of

shadow at the back
of "company B"
that nostalgic and deathlike
ballet.

The survivor? He'd wake or half wake
at midnight to the sight
of soldiers marching into black
and not coming out --

then he'd suddenly wake --
to the same sight --
boys in black
night after night.

In the pit of reason's stomach lay
an abyss of contradiction
that reasoners groped to deny
without reason.

He slept through it, woke in it,
lived it -- a blackness laid
on top and under, a bottomless night
with him stretched across the lid.

In church not a mention of this.
But if he sat far back
then behind his ear the place
in its darkness seemed to speak.

Now he had become one of those adults
who do
nothing on impulse
nor do they know this nor wish to know --

but no that was not
exact not
precise not quite
it.

Fixity of place
was what he had to have,
every day the same office,
the same drab protective

home,
and in the morning the same road
wrapping him
in repetition like a shroud

for one year then twenty
and not even
gone away
because they were never there enough to be gone.

His dreams were of routine
the days and nights in denatured rows
along a boulevard of destitution,
endless personless days

and all of that just how
one lived, the repetition
meant to help you
both arrive at and be your own annihilation.

It didn't hurt.
It had the feel of
a late night news report
whose numbness was redemptive

for if time was a thing -- then a chunk
of what
exactly? each piece unique-
ly carved, bottomless and intricate,

born as if boneless, to be babied
and cooed till its unknown substance
overnight solidified
and took its place in the dance.

He found himself one night
outside then inside the old hall
of a genteel palace that
stood waiting for the wrecking ball to fall.

It was wounded like sacred space
and the troupe he'd seen long before
mysteriously was
also there.

He saw a troupe of kids expressing
what they had not
even felt yet -- things they would be feeling
in the future but not yet.

The curtain didn't rise but vanish.
The dancers pulled the room
into their gaseous swoosh.
It swept in front of and behind him.

His heart was a churn
with no place to churn against.
The dancers had not been born
when what they danced was danced,

as though what survived
death was not what stood
still but only what moved
and thus paradoxically died

and so only transient
things could become
permanently resident
in the perishing sensorium.

Something "between our death and us"
lay
in this gas
too exposed even to see precisely.

But I will take your presence
in any form that I can
whether in permanence or in transience
who knows? but in either case "in".

*