In the Rocking

I wrote this in morning Dancemeditation with friends before we all went into quarantine, but I could as easily have found this in my solitary evening Dancemeditation. This world lives in my body and my body in this world.

I was rocking…

I stopped rocking and was effervescent, like water swirled in a glass and set on the table, the tiny light-filled bubbles rising wave after wave to the surface. In stillness, my spine felt prehistoric, an animal that existed before imprints in our Earth’s rock layers, an animal untraced, except for vestiges whispering in my body. This slow, unearthly creature had the habit of watching. It craned an eye-studded carapace toward a gravity field sprouting unknown plants. 

I lie on the ground, rocking, my body a bark floating cargo across an old sea. I lie on the ground, rocking, my rib cage a basket cradling my organs, those little babies nested and safe. Safe. So safe. My head is coated with a rubbery, melting, false face. My head falls back, thunk, decapitated, and my neck opens into a darkness out of which nothing could climb. 

I rock on and on. My heart wakes, wants to jump up, wants to laugh and run away. And why shouldn’t it be that free? It could be that free. My heart has had to be stalwart and steady, keeping the body going day and night, slowing then quickening, never stopping for long. I’ve been too much that way—the solid girl, always stalwart, never getting up, laughing, running away.

How I want to banish your cares, soothe your pain so you can be free, but I’m too small for that odyssey, so we sink together to the bottom of the ocean, into a dark world, stirring in the rockweed, in a sea change into something rich and strange, my Father. I thought rocking was my mother, but it is my father, that mysterious beauty of him in my every cell, in the animals we both are.