An old dancer

Because there is only one of you in all of time

 

                      . . .the world will not have it. . .

                                            Martha Graham

 

Your props had always been important:

Preposterous poniards, rings and thorns,

Things without a name you fell upon

Or through. Now they are your props indeed.

Take that iron prong you dangle from,

Strung up, slung like a sick animal

Who used to rise as straight as any tree

Without such corporal irony.

 

Propped then, you make no bones, or only

Bones, of husbanding your strength. For strength

Was your husband, and you’re widowed now.

The face that was a mask of wonder

Wizens into the meaninglessness

Of some Osaka marionette,

And there is properly little more

That you can do for us than think.

 

What thoughts are yours, or were yours when

Half-visionary and half-voyeur

You tore the veils from Remembered Women,

Rarely lovely, except as the space

That took them into its hugest mouth

Makes any movement lovely: at first

It was enough for you to be them,

Violent, often vague as they come,

 

Until the years and the work of years

Led you beyond being into more

Than self supplied: now you must review

What you have been and let the others

Do. What you were a whole theater

Has become. What have you lost by that

Exchange, save as the tree loses by

Giving up its leaves and standing bare?

 

O Dancer, you have lost everything,

Shuddering on your iron gallows-tree.

Bane, bone and violence, you answer

Yeats in kind, unkindest witch of all:

“We know the dancer from the dance” by age,

By growing old. The dance goes on,

The dancers go, and you hang here

Like stale meat on your dead steel branch.