26 Dance poems

Retired ballerinas on winter afternoons walking their dogs in Central Park West (or their cats on leashes— the cats themselves old highwire artists) The ballerinas leap and pirouette through Columbus Circle while winos on park benches (laid back like drunken Goudonovs) hear the taxis trumpet together like horsemen of the apocalypse in the dusk of the gods It is the final witching hour when swains are full of swan songs And all return through the dark dusk to their bright cells in glass highrises or sit down to oval cigarettes and cakes in the Russian Tea Room or climb four flights to back rooms in Westside brownstones where faded playbill photos fall peeling from their frames like last year’s autumn leaves

1. He turned so fast he wound the spirals of his arms tight into a slap in the face he beat himself to death dancing he would fall then get right — back up to some music he heard all by himself no one to help listen 2.Program We tune taking in hand the remote as partner to the news. We turn twirling the tit of the dial      in touch to touch between our fingers. We feel ourselves both touch and button coming on. Or is it music we two pick up step to      that times happening into receiving line? 3. table. . . Tied to a table top      the table tilted up right so he hung by his ankles, he filled from a bucket on the floor at his head the cup at his feet overhead      with a spoon, and when it filled, then an attendant emptied cup back into bucket, and he began again doing the senseless       hanging sit ups like prayer   in the morning naked, his throat cut draining the words into the bucket from which he delivered the blood of his songs into the cup of heaven, his feet, in steps 4.By The Rivers of. . The boys came in the house home from day camp that summer they were stopped so many feet into their running through the door made to meet the guests required of        to sing what they had done today They sang of being taught though they thought they knew already how to swim Asked if they liked it the youngest explained that what he liked the best was to come in through the top door of the water into the city underneath the pool      He said he saw long lights he liked      people made funny faces and were flying. I am the guest      I come in through the top door of the water 4 to 12   for the public aquarium I'm a diver tankman to porpoises, moray eels, the lightning cloud of neon tetras at my hand I midwife the anaconda — all 60 plastic wrap egg babies — making a living living in a vision city of living cubes of water door to door. Door to door tank displays on my shift don't get visited by out of tank appearances in their own likeness hiding gifts of transcendence and wisdom Rather than glory — tubes and cylinders trailing old air   poor disguise flippers for wings and gifts no more than of care and feeding. Though I'm trained to their pH's and oxygen levels this is a lay practice of my own care and feeding      They live in a timeless solution of their histories the living broth of their other lives, their dead, their brothers      I find something familial familiar in these small squares these boxes buried in the public air of the aquarium, the slave atlantic's water, blocked each into a plot water is one with its everywhere: the how many lost of the all of us brought here — in my wandering going in door to door into the gathered ecologies keeping a watch out for the shark, in what I bring     in this extra grace said      from some black thing to this fare — get their care and feeding as if some hour in all employment living to give it goes to their loss where without that sorry new york minute's pause at ourselves in this country       we lose our colors        the gray side of money that pale of ghosts flying   folds on our chests, and we float up fattened by work that is emptied of the gain back of our lives. They come from in between things through      as though between things shines a door   we sing of the orisha I hear a singing on the other side of a door singing going on behind the tanks heard on the public floor people invisibly at work on public display their aquarium      parading the corps we've decorated as gods      thousands of years unseen that morning we woke when we had lost the attempt all our supplies everything but our lives      washed down the river            left in a puddle a fish we only had to dish up out of its own carapace      a shelled catfish Plecostomus and here it was I see now      recognize one of my samples I care for in this exhibit all that kept me alive 'til we reached a village. Come back in from my own expeditions out      I know the diving aboard landing of the plane made into the glittering night waters that are the city      home searching the long waving light refraction for its drawing of that African's face. But the boys             they'll grow up in what only is a difference in this country      as if starting the exhibit at a different door changed the subject: their mother white like many's somewhere in our people here, their African black like a many's in our American   peoples) father came over long after the middle passage on a plane to school A whole new subject here. But we sit down to Miles to Louis Armstrong over dinner and later a little Lou Donaldson gets us dancing      our stuff. 5.seat The erased unshined polish of a board that is a mind unmet nor chaired into a seat of any solving, gray with no answers the slate smoothness of the cities' street education That moving standing still we learn that rest is hanging on      no seat keeping the strap and loop's flow open from around your neck your foot out of the trap The loss of grace complaint forgets we find footing accomplishment in that 6.Dance, for the Balance of New Mexico We had driven until the land rover was in danger of never being upright again at this height. The cloud came through the window on the driver side and out the passenger and stopped, its center on the seat between. To go further would have been to carry black clown from Second Mesa's Butterfly Dance, his foggy, white stripes      floating ash across the blackened rocks naked from a fire        his hardened body We could hear the land rover strain,   his screaming laughter just before he'd leap through a complete standing somersault, and we would halt and float the truck for that moment he was air in a sweated cloud of fear until he touched the balance to the ground and put us down. 7.Flamenco Goyasques We all have women we were born of We all were dragged out & lined up against the sky Know that Somebody here stood beside you You put up your hands & you die . . . . . . . . . . . . Just in . . . Just in word. Word of navigational challenges

My friends, As it has been proven in the laboratory, An empty pair of dance shoes Will sit on the floor like a wart Until it is given a reason to move. Those of us who study inertia (Those of us covered with wild hair and sleep) Can state this without fear: The energy in a pair of shoes at rest Is about the same as that of a clown Knocked flat by a sandbag. This you can tell your friends with certainty: A clown, flat on his back, Is a lot like an empty pair of dancing shoes. An empty pair of dancing shoes Is also a lot like a leaf Pressed in a book. And now you know a simple truth: A leaf pressed in, say,The Colossus by Sylvia Plath, Is no different from an empty pair of dance shoes Even if those shoes are in the middle of the Stardust Ballroom With all the lights on, and hot music shakes the windows up and down the block. This is the secret of inertia: The shoes run on their own sense of the world. They are in sympathy with the rock the kid skips over the lake After it settles to the mud. Not with the ripples, But with the rock. A practical and personal application of inertia Can be found in the question: Whose Turn Is It To Take Out The Garbage? An empty pair of dance shoes Is a lot like the answer to this question, As well as book-length poems Set in the Midwest. To sum up: An empty pair of dance shoes Is a lot like the sand the 98-pound weakling brushes from his cheeks As the bully tows away his girlfriend. Later, When he spies the coupon at the back of the comic book, He is about to act upon a different set of scientific principles. He is ready to dance.

It begins with the lewd macarena each of us performs in the shower, then the modified twist we are hip to with that ever-absorbent partner, the towel, and on to the funky chicken of stepping into underwear, the shimmy of stretching into hose. There is no music, none that anyone can hear, yet no one can escape the boogie. Outside beneath the disco ball of the Sun no one is a wallflower, not even the two lugs in the crosswalk lugging a huge mirror, one at either end pressing his cheek into the cheek of his own reflection, arm extended, hand clasping his own hand in a tango more about control than passion, one couple leading himself forward, the other slide-stepping backwards across the intersection made double by the infinite burden they shoulder together. At the entrances of buildings even those afflicted with two left feet find grace with a stranger in a revolving door, where, regardless of gender, we share a pause and glance to communicate who will lead, who will follow, close to each other but never quite touching.

Branches etch the film of ice on the studio window. A crow looks in, hopping and shrieking when I dance in my black tutu, trimmed with silver. The ballet master says,

Dancing Queen, 2012

The clew paying out through his fingers, a deftness that would bring him back to her, its softness the softness of skin, as if drawn from herself directly, the faint labial smell, guiding him up and out, as some dampness on the air might lead a stone-blind man to the light. Asterios dead for sure, his crumpled horn, his muzzle thick with blood, so at Delos they stopped, Theseus and the young Athenians, and stepped up to the "altar of horns" to dance a puzzle- dance, its moves unreadable except to those who'd walked the blank meanders of the labyrinth. And this was midday: a fierce sun, the blaze of their nakedness, the glitter of repetitions, a dazzle rising off the sea, the scents of pine and hyacinth. . . Well, things change: new passions, new threats, new fears. New consequences, too. Nowadays, we don't think much about Theseus, the Minotaur, Ariadne on the beach at Naxos, staring out at the coming years. But people still dance that dance: just common folk, those criss-cross steps that no one had to teach, at weddings and wakes, in bars or parks, as if hope and heart could meet, as if they might even now, somehow, dance themselves out of the dark.

Oh my, oh my, I lose myself I study atlases and cirrus paths in search of traces of it, of you of that thing, of that song I keep pressing my ear to the current of air to hear ... I hear it and it disappears It was all I wanted to do in this life to sense that phantom tap on my nerves, to allow myself to be hit by it, attacked, aroused until, as if someone else, I arise I dance my part in paradise ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I read that bees who’ve drunk imidacloprid can’t waggle to indicate to others where the best nectar is located (you and I also long to map for each other the sweetest suck of sap) Workers carry far less food back to the waiting hive. They wander, wobble can’t bring their way home alive The imidacloprid-imbibed can’t bring it back to the colony. Some hives collapse entirely. I desire to say that I, I would do it differently I would be the bee, bloomed with pesticide that still would shake out a wiggle like the finger’s signature on the iPad at checkout: not quite you, but still identity more like a wave than solid you yet enough to signify: There, there, in the far off field spiked acanthus, trumpets of datura in the abandoned lot on the corner of International and High the mystic assignation the golden throat of light: gorge, gorge, take your fill, I would cry before I too failed and my bumbling body lay down to die I’d dance my last dance to rescue the hive yes, I’d carry the amber whirrers out alive                            ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Or not. Perhaps I too would succumb to the corn syrup, chemical piped into our supply. (I, too, longing to find my way to you, would go off course.) Alas. There is still melody, rhythm, someone is streaking out in air, droning around the phonograph, which is the grooved heart valve of the black vinyl divine who is winding this universe. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Someone is dancing us. Will it be you?                                           ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dance, dance, as the hive collapses Dance, dance, while the colony disassembles Dance the occasion Dance the gorgeous design                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ inside the honey of our lit up veins                               ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ between the stripes and streams of these swift rays

In Jinotega women greeted us with thousands of flowers roses it was hard to tell the petals on our faces and arms falling then embraces and the Spanish language which is a little like a descent of petals pink and orange Suddenly out of the hallway our gathering place AMNLAE the Asociación de Mujeres women came running seat yourselves dear guests from the north we announce a play a dance a play the women their faces mountain river Indian European Spanish dark-haired women dance in gray-green fatigues they dance the Contra who circles the village waiting for the young teacher the health worker (these are the strategies) the farmer in the high village walks out into the morning toward the front which is a circle of terror they dance the work of women and men they dance the plowing of the fields they kneel to the harrowing with the machetes they dance the sowing of seed (which is always a dance) and the ripening of corn the flowers of grain they dance the harvest they raise their machetes for the harvest the machetes are high but no! out of the hallway in green and gray come those who dance the stealth of the Contra cruelly they dance the ambush the slaughter of the farmer they are the death dancers who found the schoolteacher they caught the boy who dancing brought seeds in his hat all the way from Matagalpa they dance the death of the mother the father the rape of the daughter they dance the child murdered the seeds spilled and trampled they dance sorrow sorrow they dance the search for the Contra and the defeat they dance a comic dance they make a joke of the puppetry of the Contra of Uncle Sam who is the handler of puppets they dance rage and revenge they place the dead child (the real sleeping baby) on two chairs which is the bier for the little actor they dance prayer bereavement sorrow they mourn Is there applause for such theater? Silence then come let us dance together now you know the usual dance of couples Spanish or North American let us dance in twos and threes let us make little circles let us dance as though at a festival or in peace- time together and alone whirling stamping our feet bowing to one another the children gather petals from the floor to throw at our knees we dance the children too banging into us into each other and one small boy dances alone pulling at our skirts wait he screams stop! he tugs at the strap of our camera Stop! stop dancing I’m Carlos take a picture of me No! Now! Right now! because soon Look! See Pepe! even tomorrow I could be dead like him the music catches its breath the music jumping in the guitar and phonograph holds still and waits no no we say Carlos not you we put our fingers on his little shoulder we touch his hair but one of us is afraid for god’s sake take his picture so we lift him up we photo- graph him we pass him from one to another we photograph him again and again with each of us crying or laughing with him in our arms we dance

...at the still point, there the dance is. —T. S. Eliot The errand into the maze, Emblem, the heel’s blow upon space, Speak of the need and order the dancer’s will. But the dance is still. For a surmise of rest, over the flight of the dial, Between shock of the fall, shock of repose, The flesh in its time delivered itself to the trial, And rose. Suffrance: the lapse, the pause, Were the will of the dance— The movement-to-be, charmed from the shifts of the chance, Intent on its cause. And the terrible gift Of the gaze, blind on its zenith, the wreath Of the throat, the body’s unwearied uplift, Unmaking and making its death, Were ripeness, and theme for return: Were rest, in the durance of matter: The sleep of the musing Begetter And the poise in the urn.