To The Pains Of Her Dance Poem by Robert Rorabeck

These bodies play their bands, pumping,
In the chorus of the neighborhoods and the worlds:
They wake up and pat their children:
On Sundays the go to zoos or musicals:
If broken down they are symmetrical: they know so much beauty:
When asleep, they don’t know it, but they float with the Man O’
War:
Then her dress is the perfect ocean-It is the séance, weeping,
Curling beautiful all of that green:
The sky evaporate of the same stuff, with corsages thrust into her
Thrown from the coquina walls of the fort where the
Bachelors hang out looking far across her
Standing like paled predestinations up from the sunken armor
Of the missing conquistadors:
They have been kidnapped by these centuries and taken mightily
Into her- maybe they are entranced into her gown
Like the leashes on a sled; and we wake up and rub our eyes
And then get busy moaning, our throats ululating as we hearken
To the pains of her dance.