so
you think you can dance

you can

you shouldn’t be fooled
into thinking otherwise by
these hardbodies
all air and fire
slow burn turning to flash power
with presence of mind
and uncanny kinesthetics
reminding us all
of those occasional moments
during the best sex of our lives
when the body did exactly
what the body was asked to do

if
you think you can dance
then
you can

think of all the great dancers you know

grandmothers
rotating their wheelchairs
around awkwardly tuxedoed grandsons
at wedding receptions in VFW halls

spontaneous office party freaks
loudly regretting they had that last Jagerbomb
but secretly thrilled at the cheers and screams
busting out like firecrackers around them

construction workers pirouetting
over the piled up prefab sections
of the first new house they’ve worked on in a while
while sorting out which bill they’ll pay first when they get paid

that baby girl shaking her tiny butt to the loudest radio on the block
until big daddy scoops her up and she giggles
and buries her face in his shoulder
while he bounces along to the beat

same baby girl a dozen years later
catching hold of something bigger than the stripper pole
and one tuesday afternoon in a half-empty gentleman’s club
making one man swear off ever seeing another dancer after seeing her

a greasy man doing a driveway oil change
timing the turns of his wrench to some old C&W twang
and only sliding out from under the car satisfied
when the song burps up a pedal steel epiphany

dropout in traffic
on steering wheel drum
hands and hair flying
in heavy metal tarantelle

if you think you can dance
then you can
the only time you can’t
is when you settle into
the can’t
of your couch
and let them convince you
that you’re wrong

there’s nothing wrong with imagining
perfection and admiring
the journey toward it

but if someone with an agenda
about picking your soul’s poorer pockets to make his money
ever clowns you
into telling yourself
that any dancing that is not perfect
is forbidden

get up off the couch
and dance
all shaky heart and floppy fingered
dance
all blisterheeled and trippy toed
dance like someone died and made you
gene
cyd
elvis
shakira
michael
or mikhail

you have always been a dancer
everyone dances

even if just once
all alone
in a bedroom
in front of a mirror
transformed
and deathless
breathless
in motion

Ten empty cans of Dr. Pepper
are tossed into the bin
to be carried to the curb,
every one of them a discarded
Rosetta Stone.

You don’t know which one
you were draining yesterday
when you noticed that the last poppy
in the front yard had bloomed,
after all the others
had already dropped their crepe
and begun to turn to seeds.

If you could only remember now
how seeing it made you feel
young again, how you made yourself
a promise to play more guitar, drink more water,
eat better, love more carefully and with greater focus
on what comes after the loving is done.

You swore you’d look for hope
in the last place you’d seen it.

If you could find that one can
and hold it to your lips again,
pull one last warm and sticky drop from it,
you would remember.

But you don’t and you can’t.
All you see is that ten cans are empty
and only two are left in the fridge
for today.  All you see is that you need
to buy more Dr. Pepper,

so you make a note of that
on the pad
on the refrigerator door

and go back to sleep.

It was
going to be something.  Something you
expected to happen,
even if you didn’t know what
it would look like, sound like.
How it would be.

Something
that had rippled the lake lying still

just a moment before,

a monster or a nymph
under the surface,
just out of reach
of verification.

Something,
it was going to be
something.

There are nights now when you can’t sleep
and all you can do was stare at the pillow
and imagine it cooling as you left the room
to tend to —

something, something

wailing and wet
but exactly what you had desired
even though you had tried to picture it
and failed.

Something in you is breaking open —

it would have been something,
something worth having, a voice
asking for you and you alone.  A face
not seen before.  A potential
grown from your own possibilities.

Something that won’t happen, now.
A plan deferred for the moment or the ages.
Something, you keep telling yourself, something mine —

something tangible, real,

something as alive as you suspect
you won’t be again,
not for a while.

A French plane crashes in the Atlantic.
Auto plants all over America prepare to close.
The last survivor of the Titanic dies.
A doctor is shot to death in his church,
presumably by another religious man.

It’s keeping us up at night.
Peaceful sleep is an endangered species.
Soon churches everywhere will be holding
round the clock services for bleary congregants
demanding that prayer and supplication start working again
at their usual job of keeping hope afloat —

because it’s sinking, isn’t it?  What we knew
and counted on is disappearing under wave after wave
of unfamiliar tragedy. ( Or, rather, tragedy
once unfamiliar to us all here, in this place.
It’s not like people haven’t died before, or been killed,
it’s not like industries haven’t failed before.)
It hasn’t been the same since the Towers fell,

we keep telling each other.
We tell God that all the time too.
We beg Him to put them back up.
We keep reading the news to see if He’s been listening.
It’s hard to say.

Some of us,
supine and insomniac
in the lightless tent of our worst imagining,
are afraid that He is listening,
but to someone else this time.

Some of us believe He’s dead, or vacationing,
maybe in the south of France.
(Maybe He was on that plane?)

Once in a while,
someone points out how strange it is
that we should care so much about
the specifics of who is dying and what is failing.
People, they say, are dying and killing and destitute
and scared and angry and they always have been.
It’s always felt like hell to be alive for some.
It’s just been a while since it was our turn to feel it here.

We usually do something to the ones who say that —
nod at them before turning our backs on them,
or else we kill them.  The difference, we tell them,
is that it isn’t supposed to be us.  And when we say “us,”

we include everyone we like to think of as “us,”
the most mutable category in our world.  “Us”
changes.  It gets bigger, smaller, elongates,
closes in on itself late at night in our cold houses,
blows out its own walls when it’s sunny and warm and
all is going OK.

The news keeps reminding us of what “us” means.

It’s a plane full of people, maybe some Americans aboard.
It’s our very own auto industry coming back strong, maybe.
It’s the last link to the last iconic tragedy disappearing
and leaving us with mythology we’ll have to make ourselves.
It’s the doctor dying for his cause, the killer killing for his.
It’s saying that it’s all gonna be alright, and warm, and sunny,
once we get over this rough patch,
glimmers of hope out there,
it’s saying
shhhh…

go back to sleep…

but we can’t.
The sound of of that new tower
being built
is keeping us up.