The Dance Had Begun

The Dance Had Begun

You told her she had wasted her days, that she should have
spent more time dancing. But
you failed to ask her, or inquire about her,
why her breath came like gasps of sundown so
early in the morning.
You suggested she could do better,
you commanded her to smile,
and she did, so as not to upset you,
but her feet stay glued under your vision.
Her thoughts wound around her like smoke
from a burned-out village, like the steam from
a circus calliope. The clowns had gone home
before the bigtop collapsed.
You wasted her time with your inquisition,
you stole her soul with your invented advice.
She heard but could not listen; sighs were her
language and you
spoke in unknown tongues.
You could not answer the question in her eyes,
you had no language and made no reply. She
knew,
though untranslated,
you meant well but missed the target, missed the
heart of it all.
She would have cried if you had given her time,
she would have written her pain on a dozen
cocktail napkins.
She wished for semi-darkness, she hoped for
another song to begin. She looked for faces that
read her sadness. She searched for the one hand
that spoke more than
a dozen deductions. She could not move as long as
the suggestions shoved her into corners, over cliffs, and
into canyons while she waited for just one slice of
an
orange from China,
or chocolate from the Mexican coast.

She floated once the silence left her alone with
the one who offered to walk her home and silently
offered her cherries and wine. No one knew it,
but the dance had begun.