PRIM NOTES
a dreamer gettin’ onward
(Joe Zawinul, Al Jarreau, "A Remark You Made”)
One
Sister, it’s just us now in the living room, hand-clapping through hallelujah stomps and shouts, we have a little church with our eyes closed, our sweat slicked cheeks and arms raised and pumping in rhythm, while our backs and feet chase the bop, the slop, the jerk, the other dancers having slowed to the two-step before sauntering away from our frenzy carry the party into the next room where they can hold on to their buzz and langour in this humid night, having started out dancing all of us together in a more sedate way that registered our concessions to our middle-aged limitations or the inches, miles and years from the good old days, until they realize that somehow the fun, the easy, has morphed into something more intense and autobiographical that has its roots in sudden inelegant splits and bone-crushing thumps, hands raised for the stinging slap in past’s elsewhere, or in the intentionality of mosquitoes on Mound Bayou’s humid summer nights with shaggy lawns more weeds and bare patches than grass and storybook blue skies and the sweetest blackberry bushes just off the Mississippi clay road with a six-year-old little girl named Oona and how her nimble hands and snaggle-toothed smile made the risk of reaching into the thorny bush and purpled fingertips worth it. O sister, this night we dance come close to crying but we can’t acknowledge that it’s that deep. We can’t just stop in the middle of the song or give in to the incremental thefts that living has wrung from us and slip our arms around each other’s waists with any kind of grace, because that’s not who we are. Suddenly, we glance side-long at each other and with a kind of goofy shrug of our identical shoulders, we fall on Adrienne’s ancient orange plaid sofa, exhausted and vivid with the knowledge that the energy that created us is how we love and hate and make, how we’ll never really die, and what seeds our memories for living to come.
