There are times your dancers undermine
the humanist in me. In that northern
Cockaigne, you viewed with a realist's eye,
their heartiness tramps to raucous tuning.
Unconstrained, the couples are blatant;
the heaving trestles piled with plates.

Such carouses, what were they to you?
Did you celebrate, despise, or pity?
For there is shown mere lumbering daftness,
feet clumping across the floor. No models
implying any ideal, they dance
to a music beyond vice or virtue.

Yet here, on a bleaker page, I see how,
tentative and docile, your six blind men
appal. Against a grizzled wash of sky,
a sparse landscape of church and trees,
they make their trek of faith: a procession
of pain from one dark ledge to the next.

Theirs is a suffering beyond reach
of plausible gods: their desolate sphere
an abandoned acre, here laid bare
to affront our safest minds. Their sticks lurching,
they stumble on the bank of a stream;
while we tread the limits of what words mean.