Totentanz

Three days of thought, dancing.  A day or two of the dead.

There’s the goddess who drowns children. The goddess who goes down and then returns.  And the two dead under the tomb.

There’s the death in the eyes of another, though he is not dead but only beginning to live.  Eyes can dance, you know, and then wither in sockets and maybe still see.

Why do I need a skull?  Not one to hold within a mind, or not mine, but one to hold in a hand, eyes withered, dry voices still speaking.

The dead touch you and you remember all the times you wanted to die, or feared dying, or actually feared life so much that you could only think on death.

Breeding life in soil, relentless, so much it drowns in its own fecund exuberance.  A goddess drowns children because we drown ourselves.

You’re drowning in his eyes, which is a kind of death.

“Time to dance with the one who set them free,” and “We live, we die,” and you don’t even like The Doors but it works.

Sit on a tomb while another sleeps in the sun. Say hello, and read their names, and think to yourself it’s so ridiculous that you want someone to laugh at you.  Dionisia. Dimetria.

Dances can kill like Desire.  ‘…thigh, and death smiled.’ St. Vitus and Tarantellas and you really find yourself thinking on this, because

Desire is a kind of death, and desire is a dance, and the threads snap but they don’t because it’s all still together.

Eyes wither in the skull but still see, because we don’t need them.  We never needed the light except to remind us how to look.

He looks, and you cannot imagine that withering.  He comes again, and you wonder if you finished what there was to do.

And you ask yourself why you’re not dancing, because even the dead still desire, even the dead still dance.