Attending Murmurations Dance
or Precarity

 

how seamless the dancers lean in, float apart
their near collisions fluid as starlings
and swallows that swoop their way
to evening roost

all eyes widen
sixteen agile limbs arc like eighth notes
climbing, falling against Stromeyer’s sculptures,
bared soles choreograph his outdoor gallery,

swaying to a score of lowest frequency
shadowed by steel giants recast from molten machines,
replanted on a Vermont meadow where Holsteins
once grazed in predictable rhythm

what else to name a flock of feather-gowned
bodies, impervious to suspended steel
and boulders, bird-women who embrace
precarity

 

 

 

 

Candelin Wahl is an emerging Vermont poet who explores relationships in all their tangled forms. She is Co-Editor of Mud Season Review. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the 2017 Best of the Burlington Writer’s Workshop, HerStory and Red Wolf Journal.