“The Putting-Off Dance,” poem by Carolyne Wright
Raven Chronicles Literary Press nominated 6 poems & prose works for the 2019 Pushcart Prize, XLIV Edition. This is one of the nominated pieces:
The Puffing-Off Dance
Humming a blues riff from far inland,
you lay the moon shells I give you
on your table’s little dune of letters
that have piled up for days, unopened
as the bodies of sand dollars.
You are the man
with whom I share a wall.
All morning in adjacent studios, we move
between kitchen and work table, each footstep
tracking its shadow analogue.
November’s ten-knot gale
rattles the veranda, the sidelong
windows empty of sky. In diorama
this row of studios opens to its cutaway
dilemmas. In jokes you press a stethoscope
to my wall, X-ray vision switched on full
like figments of wishful thinking.
Moon shells pile up, signs of the zodiac
look both ways. Who says No
is out of the question? When I type
your voice is the sea in my ear.
When I pause, a chair scrapes
on your side of the wallboards,
you cat-walk down the veranda
to my door. It’s too late to outwit
the moment, redoubling the keystrokes’
arbitrary gabble to reverse your steps,
erase your profile through my Venetian
blinds. Your honey and mulled wine
win this round, your tongue-tied plea
I never quite believe, but my alibis
ride a tilting raft. You give me a turquoise
amulet with broken clasp, its damage
unexplained as women who ring for you
on the downstairs phone. I set an African
violet on the sill, its petals meant to deflect
you. Who leads? I ask the season’s waltz card.
Who follows? Our moves tell the future
in mirrors. You stumble whenever the phone
switches long-distance partners. Your zodiac
unknown: what sign would claim us
from dream’s shifting dune-house?
We go back to our desks as if
to lovers, the phone downstairs
ringing its two-tone note: Decide.
Decide. Words fly out of the letter piles
clamoring for answers, my blood’s
divided longings. When bedroom lights go out
in this coastal town, our footsteps
echo across the floorboards,
so much diverted sleep between us.
Stalling for time, I name old lovers,
quote from The Complete Guide
to Rejection. Rain squalls off and on
all evening like a difficult conversation.
Doesn’t night’s unbroken sky
arch like a serious intent, our ends and beginnings
threaded on the same strand, each single
constellation tied to consequence? I fear
your universe with its own rules. Traceries
of North Atlantic sand between my quilted
comforter and pillows, I scribble
predictions in the dark while the town
sleeps, inventing one last reason
it wouldn’t work, my body up against
that wall, braced for giving in.
–Carolyne Wright
Carolyne Wright’s new book is This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and was included in The Best American Poetry 2009. Her ground-breaking anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse, 2015), received ten Pushcart Prize nominations and was a finalist in the Foreword Review’s Book of the Year Awards. Her latest volume in translation is Map Traces, Blood Traces / Trazas de mapa, trazas de sangre (Mayapple Press, 2017), a bilingual sequence of poems by Seattle-based Chilean poet, Eugenia Toledo. She teaches for Richard Hugo House and for national and international literary conferences and festivals. A Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes and an Advisory Board member for Raven Chronicles, Wright lived in Chile and traveled in Brazil on a Fulbright Grant during the presidency of Salvador Allende. She has received grants from the NEA, 4Culture, and Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture, and returned to Brazil in mid-2018 on an Instituto Sacatar residency fellowship in Bahia.
Published in Raven Chronicles Last Call, Vol. 26, 2018.