The Dance

alone on stage
except for the music,
a man in the shape of a boat,
in the shape of lava rippling
down the mountain, slow, lardish,
white as regret, we watch

because it's weird, because it's
nothing we've ever seen before
except maybe in medical textbooks

a handful of walnuts in each portion
of drooping skin, in each flap like
the flaps of a shark's gills, a whale's
gills, and he's a white whale of man

thighs, calves swollen into the shape
of rough buckets, the texture of lard,
the color of lard, the lard kept

next to the kitchen sink in a rusty coffee
can, lard spooned out to fry chicken, steak,
then scraped back into the coffee can after
the lard has hardened into its soft white
shape, dunes of it slapped against the side
of the pan like sand dunes, like it was built
by waves beating against the force of it,
the heft of it, and the flaps hanging

off the fat man ripple in waves,
and then he stops dancing and he picks
his dress up off the floor, and it's enormous,
the biggest one we've ever seen, green
as the earth in paintings, as the noon sky before

a storm, and he's fitting it over
his enormous arms, and he pulls it
down over his shoulders bulging
with soft fistfuls of fat, and the hem
falls softly like a sigh to his ankles,
and we see it has sparkles everywhere,
it's like the fucking stars on fire