The only thing I have of Jane MacNaughton
Is one instant of a dancing-class dance.
She was the fastest runner in the seventh grade,
My scrapbook says even when boys were beginning
To be as big as the girls
But I do not have her running in my mind,
Though Frances Lane is there, Agnes Fraser
Fat Betty Lou Black in the boys-against-girls
Relays we ran at recess: she must have run
Like the other girls, with her skirts tucked up
So they would be like bloomers
But I cannot tell; that part of her is gone.
What I do have is when she came,
With the hem of her skirt where it should be
For a young lady, into the annual dance
Of the dancing class we all hated, and with a light
Grave leap, jumped up and touched the end
Of one of the paper-ring decorations
To see if she could reach it. She could,
And reached me now as well, hanging in my mind
From a brown chain of brittle paper, thin
And muscular, wide-mouthed, eager to prove
Whatever it proves when you leap
In a new dress, a new womanhood, among the boys
Whom you easily left in the dust
Of the passionless playground. If I said I saw
In the paper where Jane MacNaughton Hill,
Mother of four, leapt to her death from a window
Of a downtown hotel, and that her body crushed-in
The top of a parked taxi, and that I held
Without trembling a picture of her lying cradled
In that papery steel as though lying in grass,
One shoe idly off, arms folded across her breast,
I would not believe myself. I would say
The Convenient thing, that it was a bad dream
Of maturity, to see that eternal process
Most obsessively wrong with the world
Come out of her light, earth-spurning feet
Grown heavy: would say that in ther dusty heels
Of the playground some boy who did not depend
on speed of foot, caught and betrayed her.
Jane, stay where you are in my first mind:
It was odd in that school, at that dance.
I and the other slow-footed yokels sat in corners
Cutting rings out of drawing paper
Before you leapt in your new dress
And touched the end of something I began,
Above the couples struggling on the floor,
New men and women clutching at each other
And prancing foolishly as bears: hold on
To that ring I made for you, Jane--
My feet are nailed to the ground
By dust I swallowed thrity years ago--
While I examine my hands.
