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Dialectic Dance
I’m dazzled by her dance across the floor,
her beat an offbeat to my sluggish heart.
(Her colleague, I’m a wreck—she makes her start
as I stand hidden near the classroom door.)
With chalk in hand, she two-steps to her score
and parses phrases—nouns and verbs, each part
of speech. She praises both the slow and smart,
then smiles, explains this couple: either/or.
Attuned to dialectic, her body sways
to illustrate. These grace notes widen eyes;
her choreography has earned their praise.
With jumping pulse, I quickly synthesize:
Her present tense deserves a grateful hug.
My weary past prepares to jitterbug.
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[center]<table bgcolor=white cellpadding=25 border=0><tr><td>I'm charmed by stanza 2 especially, because it's an affectionate, observant description of a good teacher at work. The whole poem says admiration and affection, in fact, but the internal logic doesn't hold up for me because there are two metaphors at work--dance and philosophical dialectic--and they don't mesh, at least for this reader. They fight for my attention, instead, especially in the sestet, where I can see how "her body sways" and understand how the swaying is meant to illustrate the "dialectic," but I don't really achieve the emotional "Aha!" that signals a metaphor that works on all levels. The "synthesize" feels particularly out of place.
The couplet is aiming for wit, but doesn't quite come off. Could this poem be saved if it abandoned one of the metaphors--maybe the dialectic--and stuck to the other throughout, so that "good teaching = graceful dancing," with the other, philosophical, idea buried somehow in the image of the swaying iself?
~Rhina
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