Like a lone lantern that can’t quite
keep itself lit, she moves from stumble
to stutter, from furrow to scribbled notes,
until she manages a sort of circle
punctuated by wedges of toe-stops and
falls, but now she’s onto something, she’s
getting somewhere and a glide, a spurt, she takes,
flares, flickering shadows reach up, and so on,
until nights later, a different person now,
arms out, she starts to spin, arms in she
enters herself, like birds in tree, seraphim
humming, chandelier ringing, and moves off
into night she now thinks she knows with her
entire body, the way a blind person touches
blackness as pricks of sharp bubbles, and
she is spirit beyond the surface on which
feelings play, leaving them etched in ice.