The Leap

The only thing I have of Jane MacNaughtonIs one instant of a dancing-class dance.She was the fastest runner in the seventh grade,My scrapbook says, even when boys were beginningTo be as big as the girls,Though Frances Lane is there, Agnes Fraser,Fat Betty Lou Black in the boys-against-girlsRelays we r 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 beFor a young lady, into the annual danceOf the dancing class we all hated, and with a lightGrave leap, jumped up and touched the endOf one of the paper-ring decorations

To see if she could reach it. She could,And reached me now as well, hanging in my mindFroma b rown chain of brittle paper, thinAnd muscular, wide-mouthed, eager to proveWhatever it proves when you leapIn a new dress, a new womanhood, among the boysWhom you easily left in the dustOf the passionless playground. If I said I sawIn the paper where Jane MacNaughton Hill,

Mother of four, leapt to her death from a windowOf a downtown hotel, and that her body crushed-inThe top of a parked taxi, and that I heldWithout trembling a picture of her lying cradledIn that papery steel as though lying in the grass,One shoe idly off, arms folded across her breast,I would not believe myself. I would sayThe convenient thing, that it was a bad dreamOf maturity, to see that eternal process

Most obsessively wrong with the worldCome out of her light, earth-spurning feetGrown heavy: would say that in the dusty heelsOf the playground some boy who did not dependOn 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 slowly-footed yokels sat in cornersCutting rings out of drawing paper

Before you leapt in your new dressAnd touched the end of something I began,Above the couples struggling on the floor,New men and women clutching at each otherAnd prancing foolishly as bears: hold onTo that ring I made for you, Jane—My feet are nailed to the groundBy dust I swallowed thirty years ago—While I examine my hands.

from Falling (1967)