Condemning a Waltz

Saint Paul, 17 January 2005

Dance clouds must be an oracle's concubine

Uncertainty, ground mist below immeasurables

Standing up to the un-reckoned crescendo

Absolutes burrow stumps like ants in rot wood

Until your dance card is illegible chicken scratch

Browbeaten two-steps bellowed by windbags

Coalitions of simpletons decry temptation's ball

Siren songs silenced long before shoes danced

Our elders condemn a waltz but also assure us

Abandoned women make the best dancers

The river might be good to you. The calyx

Of a rosebud might hold everything

Needed to nuture the perfect flower. Yet

A two-seven off-suit is no ace-ace pocket rocket

So when asked to dance, shimmy like an eel pout

Notes:

Abandoned Women the Best Dancers is a chapter in

the anti-dance treatise The Ball-Room to Hell

by T. A. Faulkner (1892).