She Dives
For Monica Alicia Ellison
She dives into the penché like a salmon seeking river. Working leg sweeps up, arcing past noon, body hurtles down the same equation to complete the curve.
And hold
Mary’s spitting poetry in a cracked mountain voice. Storm’s in the valley. Lightening.
Holds that penché in moving stillness, bolt from earth to heaven, heaven to root as the teller spills her tale.
And it’s 10 years on or 11 or 12 and she’s working through attitude derrière, à la seconde, devant. The music pools like water. Working leg floats
on the surface of water
And her stillness is now true motion, adjustments at the hip, the wounded knee (not the ankle, though, her feet are earth and strong) and the watchers become anxious because we want dance to seem like magic. We think technique means zippers, not bone and flesh, not
She still has the most beautiful cambré in Chattanooga, sternum opens into water lilies, cambré side and back, front — those arms that swim on air — and she’s still standing on that left leg, shifting shifting, parallel to turned out and return.
And don’t you know this is technique, friends, not a salmon dropping but a hawk on tower, shifting with the thermals
A dance each morning, every day without fail for years, it tells in the breath and bones. This is technique, this is art, you need years to find it, years to watch her art become her body
until you hover on your own last breath
and plunge