For the Pianist on Smoke Break Outside the Grand Rapids Ballet Company by Andrew Collard

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In a corps, it matters less whose steps are whose, but still,

…………………a dissonance among them can unravel 

the whole of the performance. Tonight, my little danseur 

…………………doesn’t feel too much like dancing, 

I can tell: this style of movement, also, is syntax, 

…………………and he constructs it even as his thoughts 

are elsewhere, never wants to skip. If the countryside 

…………………is consumed with water, he dances. 

If the routes we take are too scabbed over with work crews 

…………………to pass, he dances. It’s not the vaguely 

distant payoff of recital that compels him, but the being here: 

…………………the director’s instructions echoing 

above the piano, the tunes you shuffle nimbly through, 

…………………measures branching, the dancers 

and their weekly repetitions of the shift to first position 

…………………or to second. To call it holy would be 

to disregard how casual this practice is, how plain, 

…………………and anyway, I have grown tired 

of holiness. The argument over what must be preserved 

…………………as sacred and by whom will burn on 

without us like a wildfire of obscure origin, while loosed 

…………………children play chase in the lobby between 

the minute the advanced class ends and theirs begins, 

…………………one finishing his bag of fries, another 

slumped against his mother not unhappily, running fingers 

…………………through a carpet whose texture always 

will return him here, this surface of an unfamiliar world.

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Andrew Collard is the author of Sprawl (Ohio University Press, 2023), winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He lives with his son in Grand Rapids, MI, where he teaches writing at Grand Valley State University. 

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9 October 2023