The Head of a Dancer

Audio: Read by the author.

The days when you lean your head forward, then pull your head back, to see the sun is only a chrysanthemum, the eye is a white lake with a black boat moored at a particle pier that says what you want back isn’t coming. The white speck says there is a light source that shines day and night far from a balcony on which an audience waits to see us open our doll eyes and close them again. I keep my face facing front to see every last thing that is coming. What is coming is this: a hat to be worn when taking a train, a compact in a pocket, a letter in a pocket, two hands, a waterfall pouring its contents into a well-worn shuddering mind. I’m as devoted to knowing as the dim fish swimming in an ever-widening circle. Today outraced the latest hour of midnight, my hat tells you that. That and that I strangely resemble you: eyes, nose, lips that refuse to open, knowing the face is glass and that glass can make or break you. The dog in the street pauses just as a car comes. Where does it stop? And now this, someone says. The precise line draws the bone that holds the cheek in place. The cheek waits to be kissed by air as it was once kissed by the dark-haired boy in the boathouse whose late-night lesson was that the distance between what had been described and what was now happening was immeasurable. The morning after, the black shoes on the shelf were married to a new all-encompassing idea: the dress is no longer the thing the future is founded on. You put it on. You take it off.