“Tango Lesson” – Lisa Richter
by richibi
‘El Jaleo‘ (1882)
_________
After a history lesson, crash course in Buenos Aires
a hundred years before our time, we begin
at last. You gently place my arm over yours, my hand
on your shoulder, our bodies distant enough
to have an invisible body between us – this is open embrace,
you explain, abrazo abierto. We dare not dance in abrazo cerrado,
where our chests would nearly touch – I’m not single-
minded enough about learning these moves to unlock
what I fear might spill out, should I let myself fall
into your hazelnut voice – so rich and deep I might never
emerge from it. You teach me the new skill of following,
though your lead feels less like control and more
like stewardship, carving swans of negative space
that stretch their graceful necks along the diagonals
of our bodies. We’re in a conversation of pauses
and advances. I step too soon, but you are eminently patient,
your large hand over mine, poised mid-air, a paper crane
mid-flight. As you shift your weight from side to side,
I wait, trying to sense which way we are going,
and for a moment, I have the chance to look at you not
looking at me, your calm grey eyes fixed above my head.
On the small of my back, your warm hand –
a breathing orchid, cupped flame.
____________
for, especially, Tonyia
the clash of cultures is exposed to the light
here as a tango dancer teaches an English-
speaking novice how to dance
there is no evident metre in the verse, the
poem is in prose, contained within terse,
two-lined stanzas which act as constraints
on the forward flow, however ever fluidly
continuous, like tenutos in music, where
the note is held, dramatically, before a
return to the original rhythm
but slowly this prose develops its own
irresistible rhythms, an abandonment
to the metre of the whole, a languid
surrender to the pulse and propulsion
of the dance, and becomes, despite
its, ahem, flat feet, a poem
the very vocalic construction of
Romantic languages, abrazo abierto,
for instance, or abrazo cerrado,
propelled by vowels for their forward
motion, in imitation of the heartbeat,
preclude in natives unfamiliarity with
cadence, the tango is already in their
blood, the teacher here ineluctably
lives, breathes, hir ethnic identity
Anglo-Saxons and Teutons excel,
rather, at political science and
philosophy, more sober, cerebral
preoccupations, suppressing
gutturally in their glut of gurgled
consonants, the more carnal
allure or, from a primmer
perspective, temptations, of the
senses
which Romantic poets, incidentally,
pointedly sought out in the seductive
rhythms of the Mediterranean, much
as this very student succumbs to the
‘breathing orchid’, the ‘cupped flame‘
of this tantalizing tango
Richard
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