Saltered States
by Bruce Salter
EN ROUTE TO, CA—(Weekly Hubris)—6/28/10—She said she was a dancer.
I studied her legs, her magnificently strong alabaster-white legs, stretching from the mountaintop on which she reclined to the smudge of forest, gleaming like a viridian jewel on the western horizon, and saw no reason to doubt her. Those legs could charm the light from the darkness, I thought, and inspire poetry in the coldest of hearts. But I, being a fool, couldn’t let her statement go unchallenged.
“Then dance,” I snapped, leaning against a landslide and digging my bare heels into the depths of a nearby sea. “I’d like to see you dance, if you can.”
She fixed her gaze on mine, her eyes alive with coiling green cobras, for a brief eternity, and smiled. A thousand larks escaped her parting lips. The icy crags beneath her palms crumbled as she calmly lifted herself into the sky.
I tried to appear disinterested, shearing away great tracts of beach with casual abandon while dolphins darted playfully between my toes, but I am a poor actor and my feigned indifference was as transparent as a rival’s kiss.
Pushing the clouds aside, she stretched into the aether, letting its magnetic eddies course between her tingling fingers. With the sun full on her face and her hair streaming around her head like a shimmering red halo, she took a deep breath and leapt into the air, ascending until she was almost out of sight.
I held my breath for a dozen heartbeats or more, turning from the sea and focusing on the white speck that was my dancer as she paused for an instant, almost lost in the blue, before beginning her descent.
A broad mesa exploded beneath her foot as she landed, pivoted on her left toe and sprang over the desert to the mountaintop she had just vacated, twisting through the air with an elegance more akin to song than motion. Flitting from peak to peak, she spun, extending her arms to the winds and flashing a smile that froze my heart.
I wanted to tear my eyes away, to plunge face-first into the churning foam and let the sea’s icy indifference break her spell, but I couldn’t. That miraculous ballet transfixed me. She twirled like a dervish of pure light, leaping and pirouetting as if made of air, leveling mountains and carving out vast ravines whenever her delicate toes strayed too close to the earth.
After yet another triple spin above the sun she landed on the plain before me, gouging out a great canyon with her impact, and then sprang into the sky once more, splitting, as she did so, into twin halves of herself, one male, one female, and continuing in an exquisite pas de deux across the searing sand.
I sprang up and raced after my love, crushing forests and cities underfoot as I strove to witness every sensuous strain and nuance of her performance. Her strength was boundless, her delicacy ravishing. Her two selves joined, separated, and joined again in a seemingly endless exploration of her soul’s duality. If motion is song, this was symphony.
At last, she merged together as one and stood facing me across that desolate plain, her wondrous dance apparently at an end. Again we locked eyes, but the green cobras in hers had now turned to black flames silhouetted against the cerulean blue I knew so well. Once more, we stood frozen in a desperate eternity, each afraid of what was to come.
“It was beautiful,” I said. “You were beautiful. You are beautiful.”
“I’m sorry,” was her only reply.
Without another word, she gathered the evening clouds about her, turned her face to the sky, and was gone. The clouds spread around me and, with a single flash of lightning and roll of thunder, dropped their rain until the plain became a verdant grassland swaying about my feet.
Returning to the sea, I stretched against the darkening mountains and let the now-infuriated waves crash against my side. Wiping the mist from my cheeks, I closed my eyes and began dreaming of the dance and what it meant. The rising tide slowly washed into my mouth, filling my lungs until I slipped into its current and let it carry me away.
The moon cast its million diamonds on the breakers as my body stiffened and froze, but I wasn’t worried. My dream of her dance would survive. It would play in the eddies and swirl in the foam until another song, another poem, another love came to awaken my heart again.
That, after all, is the nature of the dance.
