I Imagine Mary Somewhere In The Future Poem by Stephen Bennett The Playjurist

She imagines herself as a dancer
able to launch it from the State University
of New York Grad School,
and in this dream, in this school
she's been going to,
she sees a course offered in poetry,
as an easy for her to pass, quite likely A,
but finds herself in sudden unexpected trouble
wondering about Red Wheel Barrows and things
like that, silently read or spoken out, and lets imagine
by this point in the future... Yes! Let's imagine
(just like her life's dancing dream) somewhere
ahead in the future some will have found out about me,
and some things of mine, unknown now
get included in the book used by
this Mary I imagine myself dreaming of.

Then if all of the above and what's about to be
could be something I've made up to help her,
if this here could be one of her
assignments, I could say
just what it means. No one will
ever see it. It's only readers will be
those students who read it,
only because they must. She writes
down from this in-plain-sight crib sheet,
turns it in, but just now I see
I don't think I know
what to tell her this is.

What it's about is not about
what it's about. It's not a riddle,
but a living thing. She may think
just because it doesn't move like she does
that it stands still, but no. It's not still.

It dances too. It lands on the page
as though on a stage waiting
for a direction to be pointed to
or to rise up from somewhere within itself,
and thus my lady somewhere in the future,
still and silent, above her book
could right now be imagining me
and imagination itself... this curious, strange
and amazingly transformed nature
of dance and of poetry and of dreams,
somewhere in the future, I can dance
with her now as I write, and if she reads it,
she might be somewhere in the future
dancing with me.