Penumbra Weekly: Week of 1/27

I watch the seconds tick by, yet fearing their passage

Distance from a place I will no longer visit

The red knife points at numbers, rather minutes.

Unforgiving and always moving forward,

The sun and moon in correspondence

A reminder that each day will come anew.

My whole life, painted on the ceiling each night

No order, just what my mind thinks is right

I lay seeing what’s there, although there’s no light

How lucky am I to have lived a life so bright?

A blink of an eye or an ache in my heart

Further and further I feel from the start.

Tomorrow’s pressure will pile into clumps

Relentless lists of what needs to be done.

I’ll play those songs, though they taunt

The better days I can’t run back, 

I’ll long for my time that’s already been used

But what an invaluable gift nostalgia has proved. 

I like to imagine how I hold myself when I dance: 

with my shoulders back and my spine rigid

collarbones to the sky and belly clenched while

my hands become delicate leaves swaying from a vine.

My movement feels this way too: rigid but

fluid, sharp yet dainty, achy but liberating.

I favor my arms most of all: the articulation

through my fingers and the rippling of my muscles.

And it becomes easy to only imagine and

never see: the world blurs around me as I move

‘til I can only feel feel feel the vast openness

of my rising chest, throbbing legs, and sweating back. 

All this before the mirror removes my blinds, pulls 

me off my toes, and reminds me of my audience. 

My reflection is a harsher critic than most audiences. 

She scans every inch of me, watchful eyes pulled

to my left foot curving less than my right. The background

noises fade: in the studio, we eye each other openly

and let reproving stares burn our skin. The smallest movement

of my pinky toe makes me wince as I stare at her and

she bites her lip and rolls her eyes and… is that the muscle

by her brow twitching? I wobble. She mocks me, “articulate,”

and leaves me relentlessly hunting for liberation

from these flaws that turn my dancing pedestrian. But

I am helpless to her words as they become vines

wrapping around my ankles and wrists, restraining me while

supporting and perfecting me with the unbreakable rigidity

that only comes from hours of judging and years of dancing.