The Dance  by Nancy Schatz Alton

I fold over myself into who I used to be:

if we didn’t like ghosts, we wouldn’t become parents

 

6, 16, 22, 13, 8: our lives illuminated by those who come after.

It’s a song we keep singing while forcefully dropping the storyline.

 

I see me back there inside concepts I’m only learning now:

what it takes to be vulnerable enough to be seen by another: ah, love!

 

Seeing is more work than the eye imagines.

My eye spies your stance: I read it across the room.

 

We are each other’s fixed point yet separate, unwinding

becoming who we yearn to be apart & together.

 

Spinning to a pause: a side hug on the way to what’s next.

The angle of our profiles matching, our stories meet & recede.

 

The African drum carol fills my being with joy.

Can my thrumming beat reach you? We dance apart (yet together): always.