Bharatanatyam

The dancers take the darkened stage
in a shuffling shimmer of sound-
bells murmur and glint in the gloom before
the lights rise and dawn.

They are wrapped like gifts in satin and silk
scarlet and plum and cerulean folding into petal waves and pleats,
dark throaty maroon, dipping into trim waists, glinting
with gold tucked unto every corner.

The music throbs and the dancers are
thrust into movement, whirls of sunset balanced
on toes dipped in dusty, rosy red.
They slap their heels on the floor, and it's the slap of
dough against a wooden board. They crook their wrists
and it's a girl flirting with her lover.
They raise cupped hands to their faces
and it's one hundred generations,
quenched by the same river.

They twirl and are fragmented
in kaleidoscopic force, eye tricking
mind dazzling, my gaze is scattered
with the music and adornments of their art, with
red lips and glinting of a thousand flecks of light,
I settle onto one and set my flat and snowy brain
to learn their lush secrets:

her fingertips, red to the first knuckle, spelling out signs
that have lived a thousand sun-baked years,
the swell of her poised hip, a leg branched high,
the white flash in the eye as she glances up and to the left,
with a tilt of the head and a smirk,
passed down her mother's side,
hidden in the corner of her lips.