Deborah Warren

INTERPRETING THE WORLD

Although the dancer makes a jagged Z
with knee and ankle, from her révérence
—all crook and jut—my eye derives a grace
I read as curvilinearity.
And though she's only corners; though her dance
is nothing but a calculus of space

cleft into deltas, carets, runes—they form
an alphabet of angles, and the eye
interprets her as cursive, seeing line
that isn't there at all. She's cuneiform,
not language—only V and X and Y
of legs akimbo: It's I who combine

(beneath her arms' parenthesis) the pointed
vertices, where every line is broken,
with an acuity that I can bend
till wrist and knee and elbow—merely jointed—
grow articulate, like letters spoken
fluently enough to comprehend.

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