The Ancient Art of Minuet in the Town of Sorela

“I am playing on the parquet floor.

The wood is golden, with dark lines

that swirl like puddles when you jump.”

Allegra Huston, the opening of Love Child

When in the early Sunday morning

the town piazza was wide and empty

and all was sacred—nearly and quiet,

on the living room’s parquet floor,

later bleached and with time disappeared,

I, back then as a child, was sole and playing,

and the sun was turning for me minuets

on the beams, its gilded rhyming skates.

“Que de grâce, de charme, de prestige!

Que d’allégresse!”—“Quand on voit

les danses sauvages qu’on a maintenant!

Quelle putridité! Quelle triste décadence!”

two voices came to drop a sighing memo.

But I do still remember the music

there the silence played on the flooring

smoothly polished like a kithara of Orpheus.

And now like him looking over my own shoulder,

over the times’ sunken bridges, vanished shores

and all the heartless, unrelenting flooding flow,

I recognize and even hear in that glimmer

and in its chanting sound Haendel’s Watermusic

on the wave that arches once more in the soul,

the fine and graceful dancing made of balance,

high step and coupé, which couples once embraced

and a lady in one’s arms would come to decorate

with her circling steps and the touching of a hand,

all fair, discreet, delicate—with pas menus

to lift and carry back to Sirens’ cosmic dance

which starts and ends always with bows and honors paid

to the other with whom one has risen where beauty lives.

And in its heart the minuet itself was a poem for two

for its gentle figures stood for consonants and vowels

of an alphabet meant to move and bind a man to Heaven

and then, through the arrayed “S”, its turning pattern,

leave for ever in one another its spell and lasting charm

with ease and nonchalance—worthy of an inborn poet

in the same way in which love pays us all the visits earned

as it comes and recedes—akin to the breath that courts a kiss

and like this rhythm and this rhyme in which law and order

abide and inhere—and thus the soul is being met and tallied.

“Que de grâce, de charme, de prestige!

Que d’allégresse!”—“Quand on voit

les danses sauvages qu’on a maintenant!

Quelle putridité! Quelle triste décadence!”

two voices hiss and swan and sashay

like a Hermes’ wand of Eden

below which any Eve would swoon.

But I do still remember the minuet

there the silence played on the inlays

in that faraway, old and small Ostrov flat

gaily polished like an Orphic instrument,

now all but gone and disappeared

except for a memory or a petite poem

which only those may hear by whom

it was also played—when through

a narrow balcony the sun was coming,

a genteel goddess on the shining skates,

so moving, and yet so calm and unperturbed.

Thus so much had happened on those parquets,

though never ever varnished, tended—healed.