ENTREATY: INVITE FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR
Round, it swells, bells,
cling, clangs the vibration; clink, clank. We pray here.
Resonant vessels vacillate. If each dancer vibrates
the ocean of the other’s body, locate, for me,
the shore. Is there a rudder? Sequence
my star chart. Navigate our nearness.
Astrolabe the archipelago.
Kelp, bubbling, bends; wavering, weaves.
Fish school. Cephalopods, inky,
congregate; jellyfish pulse, prod
the prurient; anemone undulate, briny billow;
coral, advance and retreat. Faults realign, magma
multiplies, hydrothermals hiccup. Smokers vent.
Where are the brackish waters, where fresh
feeds salt? Tell me about your estuaries. Where is the endpoint,
upriver, where you define the end of your territory? Where the inside
of
your body pours out. Each orifice, Möbius, sea-cucumbering.
We reveal our innards to those we most love. Violence,
a violation because it pierces the body without consent, brings
the outside in, unbidden. I did not say you could enter this body.
Surgeons slice the sway. They correct the oceans. Retill
the currents. Choreographers, we need water wizards working
the wells. Folk who can re-freeze, glacial, the ice, turn us blue
again.
What water wisdom do you know? How does it weave with mine?
Show me, here, now.
Author’s Bio
Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Tulsa Artist Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, is the author of Archipiélagos; Antes y después del Bronx: Lenapehoking; and South Bronx Breathing Lessons. He is editor of Yellow Medicine Review’s international queer/trans Indigenous issue and co-editor of Movement Research Performance Journal’s Native dance/movement/performance issue.