Songs, Dancing, and Words

I still remember that time when we were dancing
We were dancing to a song that I'd heard

Do you remember the time(s) we danced? Do you remember the song we heard? I know I heard it, but at the time I wasn't sure if you had. I remember dancing and I remember the song--the two go together you know. You know?

Your face was simple and your hands were naked

I saw it. I saw it in your face--I saw the beauty and the mortality roll up into a ball of vulnerability and surprise. I felt in those hands as we danced--the longing for the song we both wanted to last longer than we both knew it could. I felt the hope of something new and the worry that comes with hope of something knew. But, guess what? The whole time . . .

I was singing without knowing the words

I was. I danced with you to a tune I didn't know. I sang to you--did you know that?--I sang to you a song, but I didn't know the words. And, I know you didn't either. But that's what made it such a wonderful dance; that's what makes it such a wonderful song. The words are half-written--half-composed. They remain suspended above the two of us as we twirl, laugh, and move. They remain undecided and inexressible just as long as we keep dancing. It's funny--funny to dance to a song we keep from being written by continuing to dance. It's funny to sing a song to you that can never be finished, and never be heard. I'm just glad you have ears to listen and you aren't tired of dancing.

But I started listening to the wolves in the timber
Wolves in the timber at night
I heard their songs when I looked in the mirror
In the howls and the moons round my eyes

I don't know if I started to listen to them or if they started to listen to me. After all, I was dancing and singing the inexpressible song. So, how did I hear them? And, what did they hear me cry?


Then winter came and there was little left between us
Skin and bones of love won't make a meal
I felt my eyes drifting over your shoulder
There were wolves at the edge of the field

There was, wasn't there? A winter that felt colder than usual. A little left between us--an excess of lack--a call to stop dancing. We had to get back to the world, back to the words. We weren't allowed to stay lost in the reticence only we heard and the world only we knew. We weren't allowed to stay in the dance--in the circle--beneath the suspended song we didn't know, but which knew us.

Then one day I just woke up
And the wolves were all there
Wolves in the piano
Wolves underneath the stairs
Wolves inside the hinges
Circling round my door
At night inside the bedsprings
Clicking cross the floor
I don't know how they found me
I'll never know quite how
I still can't believe they heard me
That I was howling out that loud

I remember that days(s). That day when it was only the wolves--in my text, in my pen, my fingers, my . . . song. Did they find you too? Did they hear you? I hope not, but I suspect so. It's hard not to listen to them; to not let them frighten us into forgetting there even was a song--especially one with no words and no sound.


At times in the frozen nights I go roaming
In the bed she used to share with me
I wake in the fields with the cold and the lonesome
The moon's the only face that I see

Roaming in a place unending and untraceable. Searching in a field where nothing grows, and nothing surely blossoms. The cold and the lonesome stretch along a horizon with no horizon. They make me shiver in my bones and writhe in my own skin. I crawl within myself trying to find a way out of the horizon--out of the immanence of the fear the wolves left me. I try to crawl through myself to a place where the field breaks for something different; something unexpected.

And, when I do, just before morning--when the dreams of wolves, and horizons, and the bed we used to share has me under--has me suffocated--I hear that song. I hear the one we used to dance to--the one with no words. Well, there are words--we just don't know them yet. There are words, but they are suspended--waiting--for me and you to stop dancing. I hear the silence of the song we created and the dance we keep hoping to share. And, then I wake--and the wolves scatter across the field as the thaw evaporates into the "without why" of trying again.

People ask, "why?" And I say, "You've got the wrong question and the wrong intention. We are always left without why. But, that doesn't mean we can't sing a song without words, and it doesn't mean we can't dance. Dancing is the best part."