Dancers Exercising

Frame within frame, the evolving conversation 
is dancelike, as though two could play 
at improvising snowflakes’
six-feather-vaned evanescence,
no two ever alike. All process
and no arrival: the happier we are,
the less there is for memory to take hold of, 
or—memory being so largely a predilection 
for the exceptional—come to a halt 
in front of. But finding, one evening 
on a street not quite familiar,
inside a gated
November-sodden garden, a building 
of uncertain provenance,
peering into whose vestibule we were 
arrested—a frame within a frame, 
a lozenge of impeccable clarity—
by the reflection, no, not
of our two selves, but of
dancers exercising in a mirror,
at the center
of that clarity, what we saw
was not stillness
but movement: the perfection
of memory consisting, it would seem, 
in the never-to-be-completed.
We saw them mirroring themselves, 
never guessing the vestibule
that defined them, frame within frame, 
contained two other mirrors.