How to Dance When You Do Not Know How to Dance
You and I fit together
like two millstones, and oh the music
we make of grist, going round
and round the same
arguments (taxes, laundry,
the leaky
faucet, the unremarkable
disasters of marriage).
My feet are two ugly badgers
that hide their faces
in the dirt when they see
clouds tip-toeing
above the lake.
The homely trees in winter
crack and fall
into one another: that is how I must
look to you as I gather
dirty plates to the sink.
You say, Talk to me about
the weather. I say that once
a tornado carried
a birdcage with a live canary inside
a quarter mile, the cage
flying, the bird flying
inside of it. I don’t know how
to make the faucet
hold back its drip. I try
to open a bottle of wine
and half the cork breaks off
inside the neck. But you, Love,
you ignore
the flecks of cork floating
in your glass, the way
I teeter and reach out a hand
for something that isn’t there.
Love, I will mate the limp socks. I will fold
the shirts so their sleeves
wrap around their flat,
empty chests. I will drip words
into your ear as you fall asleep.
I will carry boxes up and down
the basement steps all day.
I will pour another glass of wine,
and we will dance the slick sidewalk two-step,
the lassoed-calf flop,
the chain gang shuffle, the all-thumbs
jitterbug,
the fish-out-of-water jive.
Nick Lantz is the author of two books of poetry, We Don’t Know, We Don’t Know and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House. He was a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and he is the 2010-2011 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College.
