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