She was wearing a vermillion dress down to her knees,
belted at the waist with a black sash,
and over her face a black veil,
which did weird, trippy things to her vision.
She had started the night with sandals,
but then the need to feel grass between her toes
became overwhelming and she ditched them.
Nancy stood off by herself,
in the shade of Fred’s old pine tree,
a deeper dark in the backyard gloom.
When she felt the God’s madness claim her
it always made her mute, and saturnine.
The face he showed her was rarely human,
never kind, and near impossible to put into words.
He was like starless night, or a volcanic cave,
the mouth of a bear;
slow, and old and hungry.
Primal. Terrifying. Everything unknown,
and before knowing.
And he took her back there, with him,
especially when she did drugs or dreamed,
with him through the long corridors of madness,
to the dawn days of the world,
or after the fall,
and they spoke in symbols,
for words were not yet,
and he showed her bone,
and rot, and writhing soil full of bugs,
and flowers, and mushrooms,
and fruit being torn with sharp teeth,
and a bull being hacked apart,
and the sun melting the flesh down
down
down
down to the hollow bone.
And somehow Nancy managed
to put all of that, or enough of it,
into her dance
though she was not as pretty
or as graceful as the other Mainades,
she made up for it through the fury of her movements.
And what’s more, this dance was hers,
and for him, and for the duration of it
they were all that existed.