The Leap

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.