JOE WENDEROTH teaches at Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota. He is the author of Disfortune (Wesleyan, 1995), It Is If I Speak (University Press of New England, 2000), and the chapbook The Endearment (1999). His book Letters to Wendy’s, parts of which have appeared in American Poetry Review and Nerve, is forthcoming from Verse Press. BEFORE THE DANCE Clean, the sun against the numb wall of morning. I am provided for by dead men. They come through the wall, the other wall, the wall the sun has not touched - cannot touch - and they ask the question for which I live. They, the dead men, ask the question as if my blood would answer them, as if my blood, in answering, would somehow bring them back to life for one brutal moment in the sun - but my blood does not answer. My blood is silent, the men remain dead, I don't know what it is of mine that speaks, and finally, when they have not heard me enough, I do not understand the question. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE The cold light of the sea never opened for me except in that language, the one I never understood. There it opened like a door in a mirror. And I sang, somewhere inside that door, somewhere inside the sea, and no one heard, and no one sang along, and the Mothers looked for a way to take their children to the mirrorless bottom. Like stones they sank down into what my voice could not touch, and there they remained. More than the cold chains in the night, more than the silence of the language I knew and could still speak, more than the song I sang, more than the sea itself, they remained.