All sweeping motions, however mundane,
retain drama.  Even windshield wipers
battling November rain
could almost sweep
the night clear, find Venus
suspended from a quarter moon,
find the stars
executing their slow leap into dawn.

Our bodies' symmetries mean
synchronous leaps to connection:
the powerful sweep of the dancer,
limbs journeying out and back,
or even my father demonstrating
the jumping jack.

In truth, it's not to Graham or Barishnikov
my mind jumps,
but to my father in sunny suburbia,
furniture pushed against the walls
holding up the US Army Physical Training Manual.

In the black and whites, a PFC
stands at attention, arms at his side,
then legs wide arms overhead,
then back again.  He is flanked
by arrows to show his progress (or lack)
as though he has wings, or
has made snow angels
on the perfectly white backdrop.

My father got the book in Basic,
no doubt.  Then in Greenland
before his time was out
he went AWOL and came back,
scott free.  He threatened the sargeant
that fire burns paper and the records
the Army couldn't replace
and the account the sargeant didn't know
how to could be undone
by one arch of the match.

Then my father flew back
to sweep my mother off her feet
(or so she said after)
and her belly rose like a loaf of bread.
She bore each of us, one after the other
until the four of us leapt around him
laughing, out of rhythm, out of breath.

There is nothing as impossible as
teaching children the simple grace
of jumping jacks.  That going away
can be one motion with coming back.

"Like scissors," you said, "like wings,"
and we tried to learn the drama
of your sweeping arms, your going out,
your coming home.

Backstage after
the magic show,
you point out false doors,
twin doves, dusty
pulleys and cables,
the obscene machinery
of human love.

It is like this.
Or like the way a body,
starved, shows too clearly
how it works
even in its failing,
ball and socket joints,
architecture of ribs,
tendons stretched
like an old lie.

We loathe
and long for
the surprise:
the hidden break
in the whole gold rings,
the phony coffin,
our foolish eyes.

That winter was so mean
it refused to disappear
at first green.
In July, there were still
traces of December
at the wood's center,
in the shadow of leaves.
That winter hung
in the corners of August
like a bat
so even in the dog days
it would suddenly blow
cold.  Its wings could
kick up a wind at dusk
recalling that this lush
day was anything but
timeless.  It was a winter
so mean
it took two summers
to pry its hands
off the trunks of trees,
off the hedges and reeds
of this flat county.
And when July finally
dragged it over the woods,
it snapped the crowns
of pines; it kicked
sand from the coastline,
and it took one man,
one warm, beautiful man,
I would it had left behind

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