The Spear Cuts Through Water

by Simon Jimenez

It would only be later, as people recounted what had happened or what they heard had happened, that they would settle on a title for what the two warriors performed on that day. It was a title that, like the other dances of the land, was described in its own movements, in the way two men leapt in synchronicity and landed on solid feet and held each other against the coming end. And we thought the movements together, and we expressed with our bodies that same thought. We were not ourselves anymore but each other, speaking through our bodies to a wounded and grieving land. And what we said was this: The body holds the body. The arms hold the spear. And the spear cuts through water. The water stopped, as if frozen—as if the energies that composed the wave had gone still to listen to the whisper of the sky. And then it split, right down the middle, like a part in the hair, like a crack of the shell of a tajeline. Like two wings, unfolding.