Her Disrobing

She has said, “In dance, there is always gravity,
for movement is a continual exchange of weight.
If you’re doing it right, it is as if nothing touches ground.
To rise, you must lower yourself toward earth.
You must think down. You must humble your body.”

I do not recall her movements as desperate, but
I think of her raw doomed pull inside the music,
down to a place where pulse and breath have stopped.
She liked it that way, dance as a sculpting of space,
of stealing shape out of nothing: her arm curved

overhead in the dark, her eyes and chin tilted
down, even her hair across her face still. Tonight,
her dance might have become something for the men
along her life, or for me, this new man who might be
another punishment for the men she knew before.

Before me, her disrobing is a simple, quiet slip,
upon which a crinkle of cotton is the only
falling, the only capture in the air, and her nakedness
stuns me. I cannot breathe against this turn and drop
of her knee, as she sweeps her body beneath the covers,

powerful, a sexual angel. In her, I swear the music
must be of something ugly, the body accustomed
to a pain, and sometimes, too, when she hovers
above my body, so still that I am alone, the sound must
be of laughter, of one wing extending and lowing.

*next*