It’s National Poetry Day in the UK, the country that adopted me for three years. That means it’s time to post something.
I haven’t won anything since I won a digital game watch from a Chips Ahoy! box back in the first grade, so I wrote this dodecasyllabic 22-line terza rima ditty back in July for a contest in the hopes of turning that streak around.
Ah well. Their loss is my site’s burgeoning trove of verse’s gain. ☺ EAB
Pas de deux
Toe to toe, we stand with our feet in parallel
preparation for the band to play. Everything
is unfamiliar here, and a tremulous swell
of anticipation runs up the spine, lightning
pulse of nerves that offsets the taste of my own teeth
against my tongue. En garde: the music’s insisting
rhythms press into the joints of my hips and wreathe
around my knees. I follow you, bending, and dip
beneath the surface of your will, and where you breathe,
I mark it seven in the count. You smile and slip
below the lead, and I guide us through the next phrase,
until the key shifts and we switch again, the lip
of the chorus easing, turning one dancer’s phase
into the next, to crepuscular and full and
waning. You spin me, and your hands stop to appraise
the space between my shoulder blades, where there’s a strand
of secret text that you alone can decode. Our
feet converge on that limelit spot where we began,
where sound has tactile sensibility, where hours,
minutes, and seconds are infused with colors, where
words acquire the fragrance of summer flowers,
and a new song presents us a similar dare.