DANCE

Flame
rising the sooner to die,
you hover among the embers of the dance,

plucked from yourself,
at the very start, by so lithe a leap
that the place where you were dancing
hangs like a void.

So the dark space of night
when a great star has gone by.

But suddenly you return
from the whirlwind of forms
to the immobility that stalked about you,
and you invest,
like an exact garment,
the hollow
of your own figure.

You seem a thing
fallen into the mirror of a memory:
bevelled
by the edge of time.