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Learning to Dance, 1956
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For Marlene Broich
It was the 50s, and all of us
were kids, but you were older--
almost a woman--and you would
teach me to dance. You were
the dark-haired child in a family
of blondes, slightly exotic, wilder,
my best friend’s sister.
In your father’s basement,
you took my hand and showed me
how to hold you--how to hold
a woman. I was fourteen and knew
already how to be awkward. You knew
I was falling into shadows. When I breathed
your hair, I was no longer in the forest
but had broken through
to a clearing where tall grasses whispered
and swayed, where white-petalled daisies
and violet clover blossomed in profusion.
You moved me deeper into the music
and made a meadow spring up around me.
Your body showed me that I had strength
to change the moment, if only the quiet
power of a summer breeze ...
When you said I would be a good dancer,
that I had rhythm and that girls would
want me, I held you close: some day,
I would find the one
who would pull me near to her in love,
not mercy; I would dance with her
and learn her secret names.
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Writer
Bio
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Charles Fishman served as director of the SUNY Farmingdale Visiting Writers Program for 18 years and created the Paumanok Poetry Award in 1990. His books include Mortal Companions, The Firewalkers, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and The Death Mazurka, which was selected by the American Library Association as one of the outstanding books of 1989 and nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He has received numerous awards and honors, including The Ann Stanford Poetry Prize from Southern California Anthology, The Eve of St. Agnes Poetry Prize from Negative Capability, and a fellowship in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His new collection of poetry, Country of Memory, will be published by Rattapallax Press in March 2002.
charles.fishman@sunysb.edu
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Other
Pedestal Published Works
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