Poems by John Pilkey |
Nautch Dance (1931) Terpsichore the Hellenes named this Muse. I call her Sal, and she says that's enough to watch her nautch dance' fluency of use so smooth all other gesturing seems rough compared to animated pearls, her toes that spread like feathers from a falling cuff as though each sole were my unlimbered tongue, my syllables the eloquence she flung. She and I have always been good friends, the two of us like boyfriend and girl. She draws away her disappearing hands and leaves me gaping at the way they hurl sign language of the elsewhere she intends to occupy with steps of living pearl. She never grants the pleasure of a touch; the bosom and the hair would be too much. Sometimes we sit cross-legged eye-to-eye and sip delirium of pleasantness without a word except to reckon by what dance comes next. Occasionally we press an open palm toward palm until we try comparing soles as though our feet were dress, the fullness and the quietness of our share of mutuality of open stare. That's the way that Sal prefers design a slow initiation into dance, and that's the way she questions hers and mine by casual testing of a prolonged glance, determining by sitting and by sign whether I can rise into a stance terpsichorean as a Muse's act, not just good intentions but in fact. She needs a skirt to amplify her nautch, but otherwise flared jeans resemble mine. We autograph a floor by fluent touch what signature says more than flowing line around an instep, heel? There's no crutch, no hindrance of a readiness to sign, "John and Sal have visited this place and marked their license by a printed trace." John Davis Pilkey December 25, 2002 inspired by the Bakawali Nautch choreographed by Ruth St. Denis 1913 danced by Stacy Sofman in video Denishawn: The Birth of Modern Dance 1988 New Jersey Center Dance Collection Kultur 1301 |
Sal and I |
