“In 1518, hundreds of citizens of Strasbourg danced uncontrollably and apparently unwillingly for days on end; the mania lasted for about two months before ending as mysteriously as it began … Such outbreaks take place under circumstances of extreme stress … [such as] famines … diseases … and overwhelming stressors.”
—Encyclopedia Britannica
Given affliction, the body will find
a way; the body will turn itself
to music.
1518, and when the first of the dancers takes
to the streets, starving arms
akimbo, it is because
the crops have failed, the thresholds are plagued
with ashes; it is because, in the black mass
of the body’s sacrament, the remedy is fiercer
than the curse—and when the searchers found
the neighbor girl deep in the forest
last winter, the blizzard lifting the worried fur
of their collars, she had stripped
naked, wholly, as the freezing
will do, the body gone mad in the last blaze
of being here, the body blossoming into music.
Once, the body says. Once
I knew a woman
whose madness took the shape of infinite music
filling her body
until nothing was left to her, and she became
water, fire, a palace where her ghosts could enter,
departing and hollowing her
at will. It was not grace,
exactly. And when
they left, for good, and left her
with nothing, she became
the same song that the world would have sung
without her. She stood
above the promise of some river
and looked back into the city
of her one life, its fallow fields
and endless choirs of fire,
and she heard, in time, the music,
and she became, in time, the music,
and she listened for how it asked itself
to end.
Think of it: the first step
forward, the tired soul like its own plague
in its blazing, lifting up its mild eyes
for the dancing.
Think of it: the rising up, the wonder.
Think of it: the brokenness,
the holding. And then the moment
when you look up at the wild skies,
your one life
in blazing flames around you—
the moment
when you do it, then, you do it:
the one thing the flesh can do
with ruin, the one thing
the doomed can do
in ruin,
the ruined ones, who rise
again, in fever,
and are briefly, briefly
like the saved ones,
whose maddened dance of splendor
is their rest.