The Welder’s Tarantella

In their sleep, the dancers are still dancing, in the same way as, thirty-five years on, I still dream of welding cars. It’s hard to believe, but I was strong then, without a scintilla of spare flesh, tossing sheets of pressed metal with the grace of a Big Top juggler, and writing them with fire into contracts of roar and motion. I animated myself with drugs and fresh oranges, blood red wine and melting steel, until there was nothing but ache and scar tissue, parchment-thin around an accident waiting to happen, and then … I was an anonymous shape in a danse macabre, singing plainchant in pig Latin, my body plucked away by crows. I was a weathered carving on the spandrel of a ruined cathedral. I was paper caught in the branches of a centuries-old yew. So, I know so well how dancers dream, as my sleeping body twists its unconscious rhythms, as if it was a bright banner flapping at an abandoned circus.