standing on fishes -- by Lucy Rupert
Over the past ten years, I have enjoyed interviewing artists and scientists so much that I have not dedicated much of this blog specifically to my own writing. I used to write quite a bit. I wrote and performed my own music at places like Graffitis and the Freetimes Cafe. I wrote poetry and short stories. Sometimes I was published.
Like many people right now, I have had a lot of time and space to reflect. I have been writing again.
This poem started as a brainstorm for a new solo dance I am creating and its title is a nod to Rainer Maria Rilke. I also acknowledge the soft, Irish nudge of the late John O'Donohue.
****
standing on fishes
a fence of slippery parts
snaps into shape
flat
instant grounding
made of lost ideas,
the things that don't tether
while soles hang on.
the dancer hard-worked these 25 years
has been waiting unknowingly
unwittingly
for the moment
to ride
for the loss of control -- here we find the
centre always spoken of in descending
metaphors,
no single word
captures everyone.
not blueberry
or corset
or pull up
or spread wide
or build from the bottom
or feel the opposition
or suck in your gut
(that one, especially, lands nowhere)
I once had a dream I was walking on a floor
of bones
and though creepy, my dreamself found it no
problem. I crossed like an elephant,
my soles the trunks, scenting the bones
for family
ancestors
roommates.
(I wanted to write "lovers", but even my
dreamself is aware that is too romantic
and too dangerous a word for the timid
creature I have been, now riding scales
of invisible sea monsters
who resemble nothing more horrifying than carp.)
A friend once said I had smart feet.
They wobble more,
though they spread,
as
the years go by (dancing barefoot on hardwood, on marley, sometimes on concrete)
Perhaps realizing the elephant bones
are fishes: less stable than
the past, more tangible
than the future.
A watery, timid creature
not a swimmer exactly,
I like to dip my toes, stretching to get there,
to the sand at the bottom
(Lake Huron, of course,
or maybe the Atlantic Ocean)
The core of me hurts all the time
the origin of all movement, all life
hurts -- all the time now
smart feet try to adjust to the changing air,
to the rippling floor,
to the clutching in the middle.
I am not afraid that two ideas,
which seem contradictory, can be equally and
simultaneously true --
I wrote this to a beautiful dancer who jousted
legitimate windmills, so quick and strong he
couldn't see the fishes. And to the
fishes he was a red velvet blur ---
my brain can hold two
at once
I can track ten or twelves fishes
at once
when they are not beneath my feet.
Infinite adjustment is a fence
that grows stronger and more porous
as the scales shift and
the soles move.
The atmosphere: clear blue ozone
one plane per evening overhead
my heart has never seen so far.
July 27, 2020
Toronto, ON
copyright Lucy Rupert
Like many people right now, I have had a lot of time and space to reflect. I have been writing again.
This poem started as a brainstorm for a new solo dance I am creating and its title is a nod to Rainer Maria Rilke. I also acknowledge the soft, Irish nudge of the late John O'Donohue.
****
Lucy Rupert in dead reckoning, 2016
photo by Omer Yukseker
standing on fishes
a fence of slippery parts
snaps into shape
flat
instant grounding
made of lost ideas,
the things that don't tether
while soles hang on.
the dancer hard-worked these 25 years
has been waiting unknowingly
unwittingly
for the moment
to ride
for the loss of control -- here we find the
centre always spoken of in descending
metaphors,
no single word
captures everyone.
not blueberry
or corset
or pull up
or spread wide
or build from the bottom
or feel the opposition
or suck in your gut
(that one, especially, lands nowhere)
I once had a dream I was walking on a floor
of bones
and though creepy, my dreamself found it no
problem. I crossed like an elephant,
my soles the trunks, scenting the bones
for family
ancestors
roommates.
(I wanted to write "lovers", but even my
dreamself is aware that is too romantic
and too dangerous a word for the timid
creature I have been, now riding scales
of invisible sea monsters
who resemble nothing more horrifying than carp.)
A friend once said I had smart feet.
They wobble more,
though they spread,
as
the years go by (dancing barefoot on hardwood, on marley, sometimes on concrete)
Perhaps realizing the elephant bones
are fishes: less stable than
the past, more tangible
than the future.
A watery, timid creature
not a swimmer exactly,
I like to dip my toes, stretching to get there,
to the sand at the bottom
(Lake Huron, of course,
or maybe the Atlantic Ocean)
The core of me hurts all the time
the origin of all movement, all life
hurts -- all the time now
smart feet try to adjust to the changing air,
to the rippling floor,
to the clutching in the middle.
I am not afraid that two ideas,
which seem contradictory, can be equally and
simultaneously true --
I wrote this to a beautiful dancer who jousted
legitimate windmills, so quick and strong he
couldn't see the fishes. And to the
fishes he was a red velvet blur ---
my brain can hold two
at once
I can track ten or twelves fishes
at once
when they are not beneath my feet.
Infinite adjustment is a fence
that grows stronger and more porous
as the scales shift and
the soles move.
The atmosphere: clear blue ozone
one plane per evening overhead
my heart has never seen so far.
July 27, 2020
Toronto, ON
copyright Lucy Rupert
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