poem/ Merce Cunningham and the Birds (by Lisel Mueller)
Last night I saw Merce Cunningham and his ten amazing dancers dancing for eighty minutes in the college gym.
I am trying to tell you how it was
but of course there are no words
for being wholly enclosed in a space,
a tight cocoon without chinks
so none of the wonder will leak out
Instead I ask you to watch the assorted birds
feeding outside this window,
darting and dropping and zeroing in,
assuming positions in groups of threes
or fours, to break up and form
new patterns, other groups
how incessant each performer
signals a personal flash of color:
cardinal red, jay blue
towhee orange, March pea green
of not-yet-yellow goldfinch,
always tempered with black.
how even their silences prefigure
shifts already known to the muscles
and how none leads or follows
how each moves
to the authority of its brain
its autonomous body
perpetual proof that the world
is energy, that to land
in a certain space at a certain time
is being alive; watch how they manage
to keep it up till each soul is fed
and disappear into nowhere
I am trying to tell you how it was
but of course there are no words
for being wholly enclosed in a space,
a tight cocoon without chinks
so none of the wonder will leak out
Instead I ask you to watch the assorted birds
feeding outside this window,
darting and dropping and zeroing in,
assuming positions in groups of threes
or fours, to break up and form
new patterns, other groups
how incessant each performer
signals a personal flash of color:
cardinal red, jay blue
towhee orange, March pea green
of not-yet-yellow goldfinch,
always tempered with black.
how even their silences prefigure
shifts already known to the muscles
and how none leads or follows
how each moves
to the authority of its brain
its autonomous body
perpetual proof that the world
is energy, that to land
in a certain space at a certain time
is being alive; watch how they manage
to keep it up till each soul is fed
and disappear into nowhere