Dancing in Paradise Café
I’m on the floor
with my foot extended to Cassiopeia,
toe pointing to the Pole Star.
I’m twirling into the birth
of a new galaxy,
swirling gasses condensing into the shape
of the choreography of your
left arm
as you pull me into
the salty water of a lunar sea,
where life, against all odds,
is finding its first form.
I dance in a dinosaur’s dream,
the edge of a bone,
the heartbeat of a feather
finding the species and genus
of a bird that will fly
into the dance of fingers
exploring the shape of a star
at the apogee
of a dream inside an egg
etched with the wisdom
of an exploding universe.
It’s the chanting of an ocean
as it discovers the shape
of a heartbeat
and remembers how to dance,
smoke inside the
breath of the buffalo
running across a primal plain
of first light,
writing on the wall of the cave
where the ocean echoes
into the curve of the penumbra
of a seashell moon.
As you dip me into the Milky Way,
my back is arcing
into the flute’s high descant,
singing the memory of the future
where the secret of species is revealed
in the chord of the whir of grasshoppers
on a blue and emerald jewel
in the shape of a double helix,
remembering white fire
in the belt of Orion,
an arrow through time
dreaming the beauty of the Pleiades,
the temple dancer,
her silver bells, her back
a sequence of vectors
across oceans, across time.
— Diane Frank
