Waking In The Sleeping Orchard

29May07

When they pivot together he pulls her near, and their weight glides and shifts;

and though moments of awareness expand to cradle how the other dancers evolve the map of the floor,

it also contracts to cradle his hand lightly touching her back, and the way they thread, and the way, earlier, she said of course.

This is a woman he once loved, soon to marry a cabinet maker near San Diego:

a man twenty-five years older, whose wife died when he drifted off the road and crashed into a sleeping orchard.

What is it to wake within a car’s crushing? To the distorted and terrible silence that followed, cut by the crying of their newborn in the backseat?

A hand leads a certain familiar motion through fresh music and describes a circle. Her fingers on the back of his hand mark a partition of time.

She is the age now of his wife when she died, and you cannot deny the question: is there a world outside the griever’s grief?

Her shoulder blade leads an arc across their path into the sudden world.

He imagines a point on the edge of the lacquer cylinder briefly touching the table as it rolls from one side to the other, illustrating conchoids;

feels that loss and love deepen the same place.

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