Dominion Day Dance

The night is summer
And the hour is heavy with air that moves
Like a slow mouth in the leaves of the chestnut,
The branches of the elms.
A boy dances in their shadows.
Across the street in the Legion Hall
music falls upon the dancers.
As the boy moves he imagines
a girl whose breasts
are small perfect pains on her chest
and he want to touch them.
He has sworn tonight to dance
with a girl who is beautiful.
He does not know his desire
to never be alone again
is the beginning of loneliness.
It is a new kind of fear.
It has entered him like a cage enters
an animal, this thing his body does
moving in awkward grace
with nothing in its arms.

- Patrick Lane