Screen
The girl turns inwards
Watch her arms
How they turn to a thousand orchestras
How she slips off her legs
Buries them in tombs
They die among earth-fog
Lung-thick, the appalling sound
Why won’t you let her sleep?
Her green jewels, her green pills,
May-born, dead by April,
The marching, that endless marching
That shoal of fish at her bones
And the black shroud of tortured ancestry.
You mean no harm
When does anyone mean any harm? You watch her dance
The pyramid hat comes back around
Year after year you watch her dance,
Made static, vivified.
White sticks in your cigarette fingers,
The relapsed splinters, ugly parsnips
Throw her about in your cigarette fingers
You mean no harm, when does anyone, your cigarette fingers
She is driving her stake down and down,
She does not sit anymore,
Her onion tears are for the dance
The red shoes
The ballet sequence
Overboard, overground, the last splinters.