Dancers of the Ultimatum

             “We cannot separate our fate from that of all life on the earth.”

                                    – Lester Brown, The Earth Policy Institute

From behind their veils, the dancers move

and roll beads through their fingers,

counting bones of the body.  Are they asking

to turn more of this place into their stage? 

A few of them appear, then step back,

invisible.  An arm reaches forward

as red-violet, a leg axles into solar-gold air,

a few faces partly appear then slip behind

their veils, where the skin of their arms is ashen,

and then a column of hands turns grass-yellow

with daylight as we’re asked, we’re being

asked to join them, where we’re headed anyway

through sassafras cedar smoke across the road.



A chorus of dancers carries in ancient chanting,

their shoulders, smooth, squarely facing

into a move, aligned with the center of weight,

their heads held from the ground to the sky,

in parallel, one bead at a time in their fingers.

Have they lifted the gemstones off a nightstand  

of a 15th century mystic in France to come here

not needing words, just gravity of the stones

and their feel, even forgetting them

for long stretches, having become them,

as one of the dancer’s hands turns instantly

back into ashes—no, gemstones—and another 

has opened her lace veil into merganser wings

as she steps through a sense of the finite

between seven-foot splinters of paintings

by Marc Rothko, a pink field racing in wind

into crimson-gray sky, a green wave crashing

again at the edge of black-red smoldering coal. 



One of the dancers seems shaken, perhaps

by the effort it must have taken her dancing

to appear here, as she pivots, letting

beads turn to ancient bone in her fingers.

Or is she saying she loves someone she left? 

They’re dancing for this place, lifting their arms

into reasons, each quick swoop of hips

caught by a South American fish wind

through the hand-drums played from pulse

through rings through the rings, as if more

were still forming, as if night sky has shown up

above them, cast there by night in the beads,

the forest beads now holding the dancers

as they keep dancing and calling us back

to the last rooms, where nothing has moved

from starting or ending.  Are they saying

the beads are now in our hands, the stones

which have been finch eyes, the air-full

in a runner’s lungs or a river’s chemical eyes? 



The beads that have been blisters on hands at work,

the ultraviolet pollen clumped on ankle hair

of bees, stones that minister to the newly dead

of a war, that reconstruct the helix and soak

hazards from air, that drain the sun from the core

of false report from giants, slumber–shot,

who’ve enslaved the commons they’ve spent,

beads that unlock prime night, turns of infinitesimal

constellation, refigured to be ratcheting vibrato

of mortality, to grasp light in stillness and move

with hieroglyphic dialect from within

their hoarse heron-fogged warehouse,

bound as they are to dance, until

we’ve returned to what we were doing,

holding parts of Earth, taking them

through our fingers, the beads now

thin-shelled hummingbird eggs,

where our survival depends on theirs.

James Grabill

Barnwood poetry magazine