Marjorie Welish

from Expectation Studies

Experience / pausing for breath                                                         

                      / flexing umbrage

                                                          / equal to or greater than / the brow

                                                                                                          / the brow’s knit

                                                                                                          / the brow’s knit in perplexity

Descending / close to the nose.

Experience / close to the nose.

Sprung / close to the nose

            / brow

                        Creased

                        Now activating sleeves

                                    / of the Hun’s tunic

                                    / discursive     

Aldon Lynn Nielsen

Homage to the Ancient Dolls

Authors Note: This poem in my forthcoming book, Spidercone, may not make sense in isolation. But it is a poem about war or peace. It memorializes a performance by the Sankai Juku Butoh troupe, in which players slowly descend by ropes from a building (see image at page bottom). The Butoh movement in Japan was an avant garde dance movement formed in reaction to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One member of this troupe had fallen to his death during a performance in Washington state, before it was repeated in Washington D.C.

We stood voteless on the plaza 

Eyes raised to the national skies 

The fallen one from the other Washington 

Did not fly to his fellows here 

Head to the sky we sang 

Filling faith’s atmosphere 

Fearing still the promised descent 

Feared to read the ropes that appeared 

We sang a song of Solomon 

For those who would step onto air 

Those children of skies we had defiled 

Fired shorn of hair and pasted white 

Against the blue above us 

Dance of dark shadows 

Over District air 

Descending the face of the National 

Like ash blown back upon us 

Across the waters 

Lowering themselves into their 

Voiceless dialogue with gravity 

In the half light of the theater’s front 

Breathing fallout blowing home 

—Sholiba