Rachael Lincoln & Pat Brody
Gift: Waiting Room
Rachael Lincoln, like her elder friend Pat, spent significant time at 848 Performance Space in her 20’s, dancing with her eyes closed. She now lives in Seattle and teaches at the University of Washington. She still sometimes performs with BANDALOOP (with her eyes open), makes dances with Leslie Seiters, and is part of an improvisation collective called AVID. At heart, she persists in the challenging field of contemporary dance in order to question, provoke, and confound her own thinking about being human while paying attention to deeper and less logical intelligence. She sees dance as an almost indecipherable map that reveals and obscures paths to knowing how to live better. Her preferred way of struggling in this form is in the company of similarly curious people, leading her into collaborations that sometimes last decades.
Pat Brody has been in San Francisco a long time but still wears her hard-earned Manhattan accent with pride. Though she considers herself more of an observer than a joiner, she spent years attending Barefoot Boogie at 848 Performance Space, dancing with her eyes closed, listening to the inside. Since she tore her ACL and injured her hip, she dearly misses the joy of moving through space. If she could, she’d be a small bird and fly someplace tropical, though the sensation of moving through water draws her to swim regularly. Pat lives with her dog, Scruffy, her cat, Sammy, and her husband, Eric. She holds Jack Kevorkian as a long-time hero and believes in living fully and dying readily when it’s time.
Gift
Richard (which is not the name of either of our husbands.)
Two chairs (one empty),
a small table (chessboard, coffee cup, tissue),
the curve of his spine a familiar uphill climb.
The living room (my waiting room)
without dust, without magazines,
though the stillness feels like an emergency
(if stillness could shatter glass).
In my time-lapse day
I am a blur of denim and saffron,
an untidy ricochet from onions to iron to baseboards
cross-frame streaking with gloves and sheers,
bottles and bedpans,
a pocket full of posies.
His white head lolls once,
lifts, and returns to palsy stillness.
Sunlight glints off the rook, a boy scout sending code.
I’m breathing harder than I should be,
killing germs with the high-pitched frequency of my thoughts.
All the practice in the world
(carnivals, greyhounds, dances, pews)
didn’t ready me for the drum-taut silence of waiting.
There must be a strategy,
a gambit, a move to fool time.
But I know better. Black. White. Black.
I will keep steady in my blur,
watching his vertebrae settle,
hollow boulders sinking through pads of moss,
a stalemate known for eternity.
Process
