“In 1518, hundreds of citizens of Strasbourg danced uncontrollably and apparently unwillingly for days on end; the mania lasted for about two months before ending as mysteriously as it began … Such outbreaks take place under circumstances of extreme stress … [such as] famines … diseases … and overwhelming stressors.”
—Encyclopedia Britannica
Given affliction, the body will find
a way; the body will turn itself
to music.
1518, and when the first of the dancers takes
to the streets, starving arms
akimbo, it is because
the crops have failed, the thresholds are plagued
with ashes; it is because, in the black mass
of the body’s sacrament, the remedy is fiercer
than the curse—and when the searchers found
the neighbor girl deep in the forest
last winter, the blizzard lifting the worried fur
of their collars, she had stripped
naked, wholly, as the freezing
will do, the body gone mad in the last blaze
of being here, the body blossoming into music.
Once, the body says. Once
I knew a woman
whose madness took the shape of infinite music
filling her body
until nothing was left to her, and she became
water, fire, a palace where her ghosts could enter,
Joseph Fasano: “This poem came to me during self-quarantine amidst the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. It seems to me a poem about how the human spirit finds a way to endure—even if that way looks like madness–and how the things we do to feel alive in the face of doom are enough to defeat that doom, even if the remedies—even if we—cannot last.” (web)
