Friday, May 21, 2010

Fancy Footwork

This poem is fiction in its way, or from long ago and far away. I don’t have anything like this in my life now and not for years if ever in this lifetime. I have fallen before, several times, but I have never needed to keep my lover's hands in sight, or at least I have never known I needed to.

I hooked into dancing in high school. I was doing musicals and thought it was a really cool way to handle women’s bodies with care and firmly. We were very fortunate to have good choreographers. I loved the idea and my musical ability let it happen for me. I didn’t have the slender body for a serious career and I never really learned the patterned dances, but I definitely can, or could follow music with my legs and my body sway and my arms and all that. I did get trained a bit in ballroom dancing a couple times in my life but not so I remember any but waltz and chacha, and them not much. I have loved to dance throughout my adult life, but I married a woman who wasn’t enough into music for us to get that going on. I suppose that she would have put up with it had I insisted.

I remember being very high once at Fillmore West in San Francisco. I don’t remember who was playing that night but I was tripping on acid and dancing. The thing was, I was able to anticipate the band well enough that I put on quite a show of spontaneous choreography. I am quite sure I heard people remark about how good I was once or twice. I didn’t have a partner. In those days at that kind of place you didn’t have to have one. That was in 1966. I was just twenty one.

Fancy Footwork

I have learned fancy
footwork going past your door
how to duck and weave
and place my hands right-

would ask for a dance with you
except I need your
wild hands in plain sight
while I look in your crafty
foxy eyes and fall
into your cavernous
heart.

May 23, 2009 10:36 AM

4 comments:

  1. except I need your
    wild hands in plain sight

    I get this one for sure.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good Mornin' Karen. Yes, I know. Even though I fall into my things eyes closed and have survived it, I get it too. I completely sympathize with "eyes wide open" and the fascination for "your wild hands".

    My natural position: I have always desired the heightened use of my other senses that comes when my eyes are shut. It is often true that vision is not my primary sense. To savor intimacy, I must have you closer than my field of vision.

    Yet there are the actions of awe and adoration as well. For those to be well enacted you must be further from me and vision is the best feast. I experienced this visionary feast best with one of my lovers and I imagine that it is a big experience between mothers and their infants, and later as mothers watch their children grow.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ah yes.

    And you are right about mothers and infants, and mothers later watching their children grow.

    I too always loved to dance, and partnered with an otherwise wonderful person for whom dancing is...not needed. I loved the years of free and spontaneous dancing with one's spirit alone.

    That must have been quite a night at the Fillmore.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ha! This brings you into a whole other light! You should post a photo of you dancing back in the day. You've led such an eclectic life.

    xo
    erin

    ReplyDelete

The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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