Rachel Dacus

The Dancer Tells

What I'm after is the flaw in time,
flow of intervals interrupted
from the upwelling cave of night.
To fit my body to its own heartbeat.
Walk the sky's harmonies,
sinews and pleats
with my nerves and curves.
What pours through life uncoils
from a seed. Tightens and releases its hold.
To notate a quasar is what I want,
make that raw gold my own.
My body eats rhythm
the way leaves swallow sun,
an alchemy of longing.
Music awakens another body in your body,
a rustling ascent that raises flesh
along the arc of love's
full-throated flame.

Rachel Dacus writes: My work has appeared in Bellowing Ark, Blue Unicorn, Poet Lore, Midwest Quarterly, Portland Literary Review, Whole Notes and Zuzu's Petals, as well as other magazines. My poem "Encounter" was included in the anthology The Poetry of Roses (Abrams, 1995). I live in the San Francisco Bay Area where I work as a fundraising consultant to nonprofit organizations. I am at work on translations of Rilke's French poems and am completing a new manuscript of poems, Thunder Overhead. My homepage is at http://home.earthlink.net/~dacusr/.