Thin Spun Thread                                      September 10, 1985

They dance and they dance and some are happy and some aren’t

and there is a skirt and a swirl and I am here and I am not here

but in another city and I remember Seattle, the shell with the band

in the evening in the park where friends were embracing and a perfect

yellow shirt, a little red clarinet playing so softly, the boom boom

of congas in the trees, my body opening like the eye of a camera,

hungry for color, hungry for grit, and I remember running down the hill,

flying at sharp angles through tossed shoes, trolley-buses, traffic jams,

hot mustard, bowls of won ton and the skirt and the swirl and sirens,

the world broken pieces on a crazy string of circumstance,

the poor flung to the curbs, children in parked cars with dogs and starvation,

my own starvation and the women under the freeway waving me on,

skirts hiked to heaven, begging for change, and the Japanese troupe, Sankai Juku

the Butoh dancer, his bald thin body dusted with powder, feet in the air,

back to the ground, six stories up descending the building Pioneer Square

the rope above him unraveling and he does not

flail, does not scream, speaks no syllable as he

falls from the vine like a moon flower bud

into bald white quiet as he slams the

pavement in puffs of powder as

three dancers above him

slowly descend as we

strangers sob and

embrace,

dance

as one

on the

same

thin

spun

thread.