by Jim Whiteside
—Amy Love Beasley; a dance for eight performers;
recorded at the 2015 North Carolina Dance Festival
A few notes from a piano, some stringed instrument,
eight people crossing the stage to the left, then right,
heads down, arms back in a V-shape, as wings.
The backdrop lit in bright blue—birds
crossing some river, bank to bank, an ocean.
The backdrop changes to bright red. They draw
shapes on the floor with pointed hands, one
breaking away from the group, then
running back, full force. They catch and lift him.
~
In the recording of the dance, I see the outline of my head in the front row, sitting next to my then-lover. Before the show, he told me, “Dancers aren’t called dancers anymore—they’re movers.” We sat in the barely-comfortable chairs of the of the small black box theater at the local university, watching them—eight bodies choosing to move in the same direction.
~
That part of your life is done—now is the time you must change.
As the camera trained on your life’s performance comes to focus,
imagine the confidence in saying,
“This is my home. This is all the air I will ever need.”
Remember the voice, projected from a speaker as they moved:
Close your eyes and think of your home.
See the man standing in your doorway, the weekend bag in his hand.
Remember why you decided to live there
and remember why you decided to leave.
He traveled a long way to get here. First a stranger, then growing
to a familiar face—a face that looks like family.
We are all changed for the better and for the worse
by the places we have called and call home.
How his face replaced the old faces, those who faded
or snapped away from your vision, those you drove away.
We’ve seen our homes change for the better and for the worse
because we’ve decided to call them home.
You raise your arms, head lowered in what could be
a defensive stance—
groping through the dark, not even knowing
where to expect the light switch.
Jim Whiteside is the author of a chapbook, Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019). The recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University, his poems appear in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, POETRY, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he teaches creative writing at Sewanee: The University of the South.