Life’s a dance, a dance in
four lines, eight moves
like the tai chi old women practise
on the Bund in Shanghai
or like the twists and
turns of acrobats
In Egypt she spends a whole day
on a camel, riding to Saqqara
the oldest pyramid of all,
she scrambles in the sand just to see the tomb
On a rooftop of a hotel in Jaipur
she watches the monkeys
feeds them segments of orange
waits as the sun sets gold on the horizon
before venturing into the crowded streets
In a room in Rhodes she stares at the rosette
in the middle of the domed ceiling
for three days, too sick to move
On that island someone gave her a gift,
a small silver cornucopia which she wore
as a charm on a leather thong
Today the sadness envelopes her,
her loss, not a lover but a way of life,
like the shrivelled skins of old apples
which have lost their elasticity
her mood drops like lead
Gravity’s rainbow could not fold
into the fall of her hair, nor its gold
be worth anything on the stock exchange
She winds her body in tissue and rolls
earthward like an Egyptian mummy
zigzagging, she reaches for the ground
She hears the cry of the muezzin
in the dusk of an Arabian sky,
sees the verticality of ziggurats,
the plasticity of domes,
smells the scent of the sacred rock
Notes
This poem was written as a performance work and between 2001 and 2002 I performed it at a poetry festival in Melbourne, a conference in Townsville, a writers’ festival in Byron Bay and the Gay Games in Sydney. When you have performed a text, it’s not quite the same when simply read. My body recalls the words in the shapes I have made with my body.
I have written a lot of texts for performance, mostly circus. This was my first and initially I found it difficult to speak and do aerials simultaneously. I was lucky that singer songwriter, Alix Dobkin was staying with us at the time and she gave me some notes which helped me gather my voice with more strength. It turned out to be a matter of pace and timing.
The content of the poem is really a travelogue mostly to places where there is an intersection between ancient and contemporary worlds. From the oldest pyramid in Egypt to the stock exchange.
This poem was published in my book The Butterfly Effect (2005).
The photo is of me performing ‘gravity defied’ at the Byron Bay Writers Festival.