I’m going out dancing tonight and we will be practicing our Viennese waltz.

Viennese Waltz — natural turn

It’s like flying
or falling.
Each step a revolution.
The planet tilted
too much.
Sunlight far off.
Clouds strangely graceful
even as the storm
arrives.
She says, lean back further.
Enough to contain
the rotation.

The ballroom is wide
as a plain. I’m a sapling
and he is the wind.
Sometimes I touch the floor,
toes starved for solid ground.
Sometimes I leap.
Every other step a lock
as though leaves
can be caged.

He is vertigo.
The darkened tornado
peeling my meadow.
The sky falters but I hang on,
fingers lodged in his bones.
I am a white birch.
I am a falling
branch.

I am a spinning
leaf, spiked
with rain.

Written this past April 2011 during NaPoWriMo, this poem is part of a manuscript of ballroom poems, though one could argue they’re also love poems. Yes, I’m a sentimentalist.

photo credit: Vladimir Pervuninsky, “The Viennese Waltz.”




Edited to remove embarrassing public whining. You see, it all started with—. . . . . you know what? Never mind.
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