Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Airing
The idea was always
transfer: how to use
the body to eliminate
to experience bleeding
toes as pirouettes turning
to tornadoessucking in
and flaring out.
All that connects the dancer
to the pocked studio floor
within a pink satin skin.
Grands jetés across the room
to the score of the teacher’s stick,
each staccato _chaîné_spotted in the mirror,
of the torso doubling;
numbers choreographed and counted
like an iron-clad pulse
as blood through the heart.
Look.
You can see it happening,
the delicate gauze of sweat and heft
to skirt the angles
of the flesh, to strain herself
of sun through skylight.
And is this after all
these years,
the point? To lose
the matter of the self,
to move beyond
the body’s weights & levers,
that keep us functioning?
Clearly we are flesh,
not air. Yet how we lean
the loss of body,
alone, voices now
becoming instruments,
no more, no less, than breath:
watch as we expire._