Stefny

The following drawing was executed by contemporary artist Chêlin Sanjuan. It was found on Pinterest and linked to the following blog: http://www.tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com/2011/03/chelin-sanjuan.html?m=1

She’s really something special, perhaps her father was from Europa or Saturn; they say he disappeared soon after her mother went blind and started seeing ancestors’ faces in the bathwater.

The other dancers say she’s got diamonds holding her toes en pointe for hours after our feet flop like spent pufferfish on the midnight wood floor. But I know she isn’t as rich as they say she is; she is more rich, but she doesn’t have as much.

From the way the sunlight catches on her lips and stays there, curled up in the comfortable curve of her dreamy smile, you can tell just by looking at her that her heart is warm – a fireplace and Christmas stockings where other hearts in this sick city are cold fluorescent bars and shuttered windows.

When Stefny dances she could be a lioness in love with an antelope, determined to murder her prey with deathly caresses and drown it in the river where bright lace glitters as the current rushes ’round mountainous hippopotamus thumping on feet of drums. And when she dances even the drums are graceful, you can hear the earth giving birth to the first creatures that could contemplate a time signature and hear seduction in the resolution of a chromatic progression.

The men who bring their fat feathered wives to the dance company come to see Stefny. But their candied eyes see nothing but the pretty costume she was given for her fifteen minutes of fame here on earth.

When we two talk in aching off-season blackness I can see far deeper into Stefny than any brilliant light could ever pierce: the acoustic gospel of her faith, the New Zealand glowworms that take refuge in her voice, the volcano in her lullabies, all promises to rise as a new sun when the world is ready for more than the dancer they have known. Or thought they have known.

When I am with Stefny, I know nothing. Neither does she. And so we dance as one mind warring with the questions of an anonymous universe. And the tea kettle whistles, an endlessly wakeful blue jay in this secret garden.