We have the luck of being lovers
who have struggled to love and somehow,
after decades of riptide and undertow, we still
find ourselves loving and dancing, our currents
driven by more than desire and hope.
There was a moment tonight when
the mandolin player transformed his fingers
into a magical surge and I looked at you,
the slight wave of your head, the secret
smile on your lips, and every cliff I’ve ever
built around my heart collapsed in a single
watery moment as we danced, my hand floating
along your chest as we turned, my smile incandescent
through sudden tears, and I knew I would swim every
heartache again just to love and be loved like this.
Posts Tagged ‘dancing’
Gravitational Pull
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dancing, long marriage, marriage, ocean on June 12, 2026| 1 Comment »
At the End of the Year
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, dancing, erik satie, new year, paradox on January 1, 2026| 10 Comments »
Just after midnight
we stand beside the stove
holding each other,
your thumb slowly relearning
the portal of my spine.
Satie’s first Gymopédie
slips stepwise through the room,
the tune like starlight emerging
after a storm blew down all the trees.
We are almost, but not quite, still.
How little movement it takes,
plus an opening in the mind,
to know the body as dancing.
How little beauty it takes
to know a sad moment
as a moment both sad and beautiful.
And what of a year? What of a life?
How much beauty can we bring
with the days we are given?
How would the years change
if we believed we were not
just moving through them,
but dancing?
Remembering Rose
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aloneness, dancing, grandmother, music on December 17, 2025| 8 Comments »
I remember her waltzing across the living room
singing, Somewhere my love, dah dah dah, dah,
dah dah. She was dancing alone, as she often did,
but oh, could she waltz, small feet like wings, her thin
body gliding past tables and chairs, weaving, spinning,
her arms lifted up in the air around a loving partner
who had never been there. I don’t think
she knew the rest of the words, or at least
she didn’t sing them. Always Somewhere
my love, again and again, like a promise
she wanted to believe in. She danced
like that through my childhood. Perhaps
dancing itself was her love. I can see her now
box stepping, one, two, three, one two three,
each step a step closer to all she did not have.
Synaptic Plasticity
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brain, dancing, grandmother, memory, Mimi, synapse on May 11, 2025| 5 Comments »
The way the eagles return to the same nests,
this is the way the mind sometimes returns
to the same memory—as if the mind wings across
all other branching neurons to ever arrive
at the same comfortable place. There are,
of course, many other places to land,
some of them perhaps more beautiful,
more sturdy. Still the mind returns to that
one moment. As tonight when my thoughts again
migrate to the summer evening when my grandmother
and I danced in our old white living room,
a waltz on the radio and her leading me in
the one, two, three, one, two three steps
that she loved. And her hair is white
and pinned up high. And her lips are red
and her nails are red and she smells like
cigarettes and Toujours Moi. There are
millions of other moments we shared,
so why do I always alight here first?
Perhaps for the thrill of her sharing her joy
which so often she did not share.
Tonight, as on that night, the long summer light
streams through the window, weaves into
the nest of memory as if to strengthen it the way
an eagle might weave in new sticks, new lichen,
new grass, so that the next time the mind
wants to arrive here, the memory will be waiting,
even softer, even more home than before.
The Broken Heart Goes Dancing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bluegrass, dancing, heartbreak, joy, music on January 26, 2024| 8 Comments »
at The Infamous Stringdusters show
Give me a night made of strings,
a night that is plucked
and strummed and bowed and picked,
a night with a driving, ecstatic music
and nothing to do but be danced
by the night as if each string of dobro
and fiddle and bass is attached
to an arm, a foot, a hip,
to the curling edge of an upper lip—
and even the broken heart is tugged
from its chair by bronze-coated strings
until it’s an open and rhythmic thing
that beats for the bliss of it, beats
for the song of it, beats
for the joy-swaying head-shaking lift
of it, beats because that’s what a heart
is for, and for hours the night
pulls every string, and the heart
beats out more, please, more.
The Ask
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dancing, fairy tale, falling in love with the world, rumplestiltskin on June 28, 2023| 2 Comments »
Among your duties, pleasure is a thing that also needs accomplishing.
—Tony Hoagland, “The Word”
Perhaps it looked like I was dancing,
but I was being danced, was being twirled
by some great mystical spinning wheel
turning the straw of my thoughts into gold.
What a gift to have a body, to be alive
on a night when the sun is warm
and the grass is green and the mountains
are not yet tinder dry and the music is joyful
and the minutes slip through the hours
like page after page of happily ever
and there is no imp to be seen, just
the glory of brass shining in the air
and the miracle of hands clapping
as if applause is the only response that makes sense,
and the only thing the world asks of me
is to love it.
One Eventual
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dancing, haikuling, still on May 21, 2023| 8 Comments »
after fifty years of spinning
I learn standing still
is another way to dance
The Morning After
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dancing, dream, grief, love, mother on January 7, 2023| 8 Comments »
Though I knew it was a dream,
I thrilled to see you and your sister
tap dancing together,
performing in a bowling alley of all places,
each of you standing in front of your own lane,
both of you smiling, your arms scissoring in unison,
your bodies tilted forward, your legs kicking back,
the bright tap, tappity, tappity, tap of metal on wood,
your movements perfectly synchronized.
Then off you both danced down the lanes,
flapping and turning and leaping and shuffling,
two glorious blurs as you traveled toward the pins,
long legs flying, arms extended, your faces lit up,
no music but the rhythm in your feet.
I watched you both, breathless, thinking, I love this dream.
I love it even more this morning after,
still lying in bed, eyes still closed,
heart full of wonder, cells pulsing with love.
I keep unwrapping the dream like the gift it is.
There are some who would say I’m unlucky.
I know I am wildly blessed to have known you so closely,
blessed to love you and your sister,
blessed to have been changed by you both,
blessed to know your agony and your beauty,
blessed to know by heart the sound your feet make
as they dance across this world.
It Did Not Look Useful, But
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dancing, Dolly Parton, friendship, light, singing, woods on October 16, 2022| 6 Comments »
for an hour we danced
in the tiny kitchen
and sang with Dolly,
our voices braided
like eager vines,
and for that hour
I smiled and swayed
and I felt such spaciousness—
like a lost girl in a fairy tale
who has walked through dark woods
and arrived in a glade
with sunlight streaming
and flowers and bird song,
and though she’s still lost,
for this moment she’s safe,
not only safe, but happy,
truly deeply happy,
and when she reenters
the cold, dark woods,
as she must,
a bit of the shine
has twined into her.
Even now, I feel it,
the radiance,
how it shimmies
just like we did
beside the old oak cupboards,
how it glitters in the dark,
how it moves.
One Over the Loudspeaker
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, dancing, music, poem, poetry on November 20, 2017| Leave a Comment »
and suddenly I’m singing
in the cereal aisle,
unable to turn the music up
and dancing anyway—
the words spin me
like old friends,
My older self looks back
at me and says,
that’s right,
move it sister
while you still hear
the music, while you still
can dance.