Square Dance at Dusk
By John Sibley Williams
Not golden. More the off-yellow of old rust.
It’s easy to say it’s the sky
adopting the color of the hay on the floor & the bleached streaks
in her hair
& that everything is at heart a mockingbird.
This fiddle could be any fiddle. These bodies move like bodies.
It’s been this way for four hundred years; this furor
of limbs, carefully chosen steps
toward & away from thrall,
bourbon & boarded up mills, the world leaning on tired stars.
At this time of night, well before the loving
has begun, the windows
are full of staring crows.
The unlit face of the moon is as bright as the true.
If there’s a difference between unjoining & reuniting, I hope we never learn it.