Retrospective

For Lance and Donnie

Traveling to teach again.
So many people I meet for just a few hours.
The possibility of friendship arises,
conversation, histories exchanged, connections
of the “it’s a small world” variety;
but they are day-lily acquaintances,
or head beams crossing in the dark.
Here, in Kentucky, I listen
to a Buddhist master; her words go by so fast,
like the click-clack of a shining train:
duality, non-duality, paradox after paradox,
exhaustion (mine?), the well-worn path across
the Mental Realm. But the question
is never asked— how to get off the Wheel
of Incarnations? There must be a way,
souls who never returned.

So many people who travel in their work,
going back and forth across the skies with what we know,
like a shuttle on a great loom. It is faith, I think,
something new being woven we cannot see.
Below us, in the dark: cities, small towns, and farms—
the glue and ganglia of American dreams.

But tonight, on a backyard deck in Lexington,
I teach a woman dances I learned in Louisiana.
Out in the world, we are soloists, gypsy imparters.
She is brave, smart, inventive, dedicated, a kind
of master, and a survivor. In the dark, in
the dance, I make a frame and take the lead. She
relaxes, smiles, breathes, makes brushstrokes
with her hips, an ancient tension easily attained,
to which we both give assent and ascend.
Somehow our light movements say: this old thing
is the best moment of the day—
stars, music, an uncorked wine;
each city a blossom, each person a wandering bee.