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Archive for August, 2008

Aug 17

Time in a Face

Hands progress around the clock’s face, passing cheeks at 3 & 9, the chin at 6. Ticking past the temples, past the hollow beneath the bone with where powder and sweat pass one another through the pore doors. Time wrinkles in the winking.

Fingers trace circles like beach grass in wind. They stop at high noon, rest there then slide down the center, the nose bridge and tip carved with family history, the lips hiding teeth, then fan away into space where the ticking marks the emptiness, pip, pip, like bounce-less dust in interstellar space.

Light lies across my little table at a new angle as summer moves the sun left and left each day. My hands on my thighs point left too when not tapping a keyboard or lifting a teacup. Hands with ruched topography rest in front of me, old, but new to my morning eyes.

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Aug 3

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Vertical Space

I’ve been swimming a lot lately. No laps. Rather a water dance, piercing deep then spiraling up. I consider depth. From deep down, I look up the surface. I rise, my hands ahead of me. I see their reflection as I approach the surface until there are four hands wavering in water and light their fingertips blending into an anemone. My faces breaks into air where the world is broken into small pieces of rounded color filled with sounds. I dive down into thick quiet to get away. A smooth place.

Water Dance is all about vertical space, or, at any rate, that is the difference between it and land dancing. Being pressed at from all around, without gravity––just the struggle to stay under––I feel the equality of all directions. I am completely circular. The struggle to stay under knocks a shadowy corner in my psyche. I want to be that spherical in my consiousness, that quiet, that supported, that embryonic. Atomic. That last is heady, when what most appeals to me is the truth of the vertical dimension – the freedom that water gives me with what is normally so difficult.