The poetic city: A suite for Miss Helen, “Dancing with Miss Helen – What’s the Point? 8/6/12”

Miss Helen in her dancing stance. (Photo by: Richard Eager)

Dancing with Miss Helen – What’s the Point? 8/6/12

What happens to Miss Helen when no one is around?

Is her mind devoid of linearity, absent of memory,

and beset with confusion?

I know what happens when I visit and bring the music to her ears …

When I take her hands into mine and we do our chair dance

I see her enter the ecstatic world and I feel the electricity

as she takes me with her to fly with the angels.

But what happens when I disappear?

What happens to her experience of time

when it is no longer measured by the beat …

replaced, instead, by the emptiness of the clock.

Does she suffer? Does she grieve?

Or does she slip into a waking sleep

What is the meaning of an hour of ecstatic flight

against days and days sleepwalking in a wasteland?

Could my gift be making things worse?

Am I bringing her a taste of what she is missing

only to remind her what she has lost?

How does sixty minutes once a week stack up

as she descends measure by measure into oblivion?

Maybe the Greeks knew how to answer this question.

Maybe the entropy that is destroying her mind

is transforming her into a rare flower or an exquisite bird…

Helen has certainly become a star in my universe.

I would be more than content to have such a fate…

To be reminded by those who remember

of the joy she radiated to others as she second lined

around Economy Hall with her little umbrella.

And I would smile as she smiles.

And I would say as she says,

“that it’s good…”

So very good indeed!

__________

© Reece Burka 2/1/2019