A History of Love

The day the waltz was discovered, shutters opened
on a garden; the elm’s adagio defined the firmament.
We limboed our way beneath a flickering horizon,
sambaed circles above cobblestones, bopped until
our feet were thick as gems. Did you know we shimmed

in moonlight? Our soft shoe action paintings illustrated
forgotten jazz, unfurling in wet-grass. Somewhere a rumor
startled us: a furtive bossa nova said to be hidden away,
lost beneath the neon hokey-pokey, or sleeping,
folded in the willow’s ballet, in its thin torn leaves.

Did you know we threw nets around the swinging
daffodils, tried to lasso the two-stepping tulips? I’d be
almost myself, a buck-and-wing beside a crocus jig,
an awkward bunny hug. Cloud fragments swirled
while the sun, a flapping apron, polkaed, its branches ablaze.

The day the waltz was unleased, we congaed words,
jubing rivers, slippery low tangos, stammering voltas.
Our eyelashes jitterbugged, our fingers rumbaed, multi-
colored as twisting wires, our bellies cha-chaed and trotted.
Knees shook the Charleston, falling together then apart.