Dad’s Dance

I start the drum and you appear
standing to my left, dressed
in a grey plaid suit--like all those years
at Sears I have memorized--
black horn-rimmed glasses
and your noble Cherokee nose.
You stand, just listening to the drum
like you have never listened to anything:
with your flesh alive in the blood-loved pulse of rhythm.

And then, slowly, you raise your arms,
stretched out with elbows up.
Your back bends and across your sleeves
a subtle color flashes, a tint of blue
that every set of wings requires.
A scrap of sky so slight it could
put a concrete wall in flight.

And, before a thought can weave a logic,
you dream and your coat of strings
begins its slow transform to feathers.

I keep the beat and build belief with speed
and you ride my release into each finger's tap
and thumping thumb, trusting
mistakes to come from the desert
like the clouds that build behind my eyes
arise of rain-wrought condensation.

You tilt and turn, each pitch and angle
pointed with each touch to skin. Your suit and self
melt inside this choreography of flight.
The 10,000 blue feathers hang,
draping as the lightest gravity.

Turn. Turn bird, man. Turn within your
chalky blues and patterned stripes of black.

I play on, my hands becoming a stronger song.
You dance, becoming bird enough to make me worry
I must somehow sustain you;
worry what I'll fail when I must stop.

Because it's almost time for me to leave.
And, in this glance I take to think that
there's still so far to go, I slow at a mistake.

Looking back to my left, I find you've left.

Needing no time, you've entered the western clouds.
No longer in the feathered blue suit used for dancing.
No longer turning to cues shared with the drum.
You've become a speck on the sky,
moving amidst the outlines of light that ride the clouds.

Now,
each quieting touch merely marks your distances
into the setting sun.


by jerry gordon
7.15.06



***I recently got a new little drum--a little djembe. And, yesterday I was playing it just before I had to leave the house. As I started playing, my dad appeared over to my left. He was dressed in a grey plaid suit and horn-rimmed glasses. Black hair. The image I always picture of him when I was young and he worked at Sears. Also, he actually was 1/8 Cherrokee and had that noble indian nose. That was evident when I saw him yesterday, too. Anyway, I played and he appeared, at first just standing there listening in a way that he never listened to anything. Listening with his blood. And, then he spread his arms out and bent over a slight bit, his elbows pointing up and the sleeves of his suit coat hanging down. A slight bluish tint flashed across the jacket, like some kind of a shark-skin suit lighting effect. Subtle and beautiful. I continued to play and slowly he began to dance and the suit very slowly began to transform into feathers. Chalky dry blue feathers slowly appeared, hanging down in beautiful rows from the arc of his spread arms, his shoulders, his head. He danced in a an indian style, tilting and turning his body at each pulse of the drum's bass. His form dipping and pulsing up and down as he changed from angle to angle and he slowly lost the Sears suit and became a man on a desert stone slab drapped in a costume of feathers. We both released into the event. I could feel it. And, then I started to get a little worried that I was sustaining him and if I stopped playing it would somehow halt him, and in that moment of thought, I made a mistake in the playing and the beat was altered, to which I adjusted. But, when I looked back, he was no longer dancing. He had transformed behind my watching and turned into an actual bird and was off in the distance of the sky, flying farther and farther, visible only as a black speck against the clouds. The setting sun drawing him. The quieting drum now simply marking each stage of his greater and greater distances into the west.