David Lehman
The Real Thing
I don't agree
that dancing solves anything
except how to differentiate
between poetry and prose
the former being to the dance
(gratuitous)
what the latter is to taking a walk
(purposive)
according to Paul Valery
who felt that an artificial rose
was equal to or better than
the real thing.
I love that phrase: "The Real Thing."
It makes me think
of Henry James's story of that title
and the Coca-Cola commercial
identifying Coke as "the real thing."
If I could write an essay on that unusual
conjunction of names and facts
in fifteen minutes, it's because
you can do a lot in fifteen minutes
such as wash your hands, change the cd
from Anita O'Day to Dinah Shore singing
"Buttons and Bows," and write twenty-five
lines, which for some writers equals their entire
daily allotment. Or you can dance.
The other day I discovered the beginning
of a poem from 1980 handwritten
on a piece of paper tucked into my copy
of William Gass's "On Being Blue."
The epigraph was from Rilke:
"Dance the Orange."
There are a couple of lines worth saving:
"Dance the skeleton on the doctor's desk."
"Dance the rabbi on one foot explaining the law."
Nevertheless I insist that
James Brown to the contrary notwithstanding
there's no point to it, nothing to gain from dancing,
and that is the great glory of the dance
though some might argue that dance
does have a purpose as the first step
toward mating and the reproduction of the species,
a complicated subject demanding more
than fifteen minutes, but as Ira Gershwin
wrote, I'm dancing and I can't
be bothered now.
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