Doctrine of the Small Dance

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published In the stillness of the room, where silence smooths its robes, a rug shifts like a prayer undone the lamp claps once, a god’s startled breath. She turns, a rumor escaping the cracked lips of heaven, no discipline to guide her, only the pure, undiluted spin of returning joy. Her elbows ask the questions we were too proud to whisper. Her knees kneel into stories that renew my faith. And the floor. The floor, forgets its solemn duty of stillness. What weight now, these books piled high, these tomes like old men dozing in wooden pews, snoring half-remembered truths to a god grown quiet? She is wild. She is rebellion in a sundress. She rejects gravity’s bargain, cancels shame, laughs time into pieces. Her giggle, a blade through the air, sharp with unspoken joy. She raises one arm to part the sea of silence, the other to quiet it like a mother. No music plays and yet the table listens, the chairs turn their wooden ears. She moves like one just forgiven, never knowing guilt. Each scholar, each sage, is unmade by the riddle beneath her turning heel. What faith withstands this soft heresy of wonder? What logic remains when her body becomes a cup overturned, and out spills the infinite? I have prayed in cathedrals, watched mountains whisper their stony psalms. I have carried the words of wise men like bread in my pockets. But then, the stomp: one-two-three, in radiant, careless rhythm. And joy Oh joy! leaps from her as though she invented it this morning with sticky hands and bare feet. If this is not everything, then we have learned everything wrong.