The Line Dance

Clothes pegs hung in a long sad line on the wire, the thin silver line stretched across the backyard of the world like some endless railroad track to nowhere,

and there they are, those little wooden people, those clipped-up saints, dancing to the secret jazz of the morning breeze, rocking to and fro, back and forth, this way that way, like drunk monks in a dream, like hitchhikers waiting for a ride that never comes,

elegant little mothers, charming in their spider-silk shawls, woven by old Arachne herself in the night while God wasn’t looking, every peg draped in a hundred trembling dew-drop diamonds, glittering like the eyes of lost lovers on a rainy highway, soft stitches of green, violet, blue, red, yellow, every colour that ever broke a heart,

tight metal corsets squeezing their waists, holding the whole holy congregation together, wooden heads nodding in perfect time, a line dance of the pure pristine soul, bodies entwined on that thin clear line that goes from here to eternity,

and the breeze blows cool and sweet, the sun comes up slow over the tenements, and they keep moving, moving, little peg people in their silent ecstatic conga, clipped to the line of life, dancing the only dance they know, backwards forwards, to and fro, forever and forever under the vast blue sky of the mind.

lying on wet grass,
looking into the big blue,
gentle, boozy breeze.