Hesitation Waltz
by Ivan Young
I.
The gavotte is a 16th century French dance,
the garotte a Spanish torture device.
The two terms are not unrelated. When the wire
tightens about the neck the crossing
of the feet imitates the folk tradition.
Country people gathered to dance the gavotte
just as they gathered to watch executions.
One woman of Dauphine noted the swaying
of the corpse, the scissoring of the legs.
II.
The boy who hanged himself in gym class
seemed to dance the air as the coach struggled
to take him down. Dreadful pas de deux,
bearded face pressed to boy knees, toes flexing,
pointing. We had teased him for his softness,
his weight, the high pitched voice. Later,
he recovered and hid the scar with a thick
gold chain. He walked the halls, shade of himself
like Beaumarchais in The Ghosts of Versailles.
III.
I straighten to the mirror, noose my tie in place
and think of you, danseur noble. The way two things
compress in a boy’s body, love and death, the grace
with which you carried our words about your neck.
The way I danced an awkward fandole down
the galloping line, unsure of the beat, the teenage
bodies winding tight about me while my breath
dwindled, knowing you were watching us
from a door, almost afraid to lift my head.
Ivan Young, a professor at Salisbury University, is new to the online publications circuit, but has
published poems with Fourteen Hills, Cider Press Review, Cream City Review, North American Review,
Baltimore Review, and Comstock Review, among others. He has also published a chapbook, A Shape in the Waves,
through the South Carolina Poetry Initiative.