There are times your dancers undermine

the humanist in me. In that northern

Cockaigne, you viewed with a realist's eye,

their heartiness tramps to raucous tuning.

Unconstrained, the couples are blatant.

The heaving trestles are piled with plates.

 

Such carouses, what were they to you?

Did you celebrate, despise, or pity?

For there is shown mere lumbering daftness,

feet clumping across the floor. No models

implying any ideal, they dance

to a music beyond vice or virtue.

 

Yet here, on a bleaker page, I see how,

tentative and docile, your six blind men

appal. Against a grizzled wash of sky,

a sparse landscape of church and trees,

they make their trek of faith: a procession

of pain from one dark ledge to the next.

 

Theirs is a suffering beyond reach

of plausible gods: their desolate sphere

an abandoned acre, here laid bare

to affront our safest minds. Their sticks lurching,

they stumble on the bank of a stream;

while we tread the limits of what words mean.