Contributor’s Marginalia: Ed Falco responding to Mark Cox’s “The Dance”

From the subtle, embedded rhymes and the music of the language to the precise imagery and the carefully balanced elegiac tone that’s serious but not somber, heartfelt but not sentimental, there’s so much to admire in Mark Cox’s “The Dance.” The two elements of the poem that I find most moving are, first, the convincing sense of the genuine, that is, the sense that the poem is not an exercise in craft or a display of imagination (both of which can make terrific poems), but rather the eruption of powerful ideas and emotions captured and formalized in language; and, second, the masterly way Cox shapes “The Dance” as a convincing dramatic monologue. As to the first, the sense of the genuine, there’s a lot that can’t be defined. In the end I suppose it’s a matter of taste and reader response. For me, it’s something I sense about a poem: that what’s being expressed is necessary rather than a performance, that the poem had to be written, that it erupted out of a powerful mix of ideas and emotions.

Easier to talk about is the shaping of the poem. “The Dance” is a dramatic monologue addressed to the late poet, Jack Myers. The speaker begins by telling Jack he can find him “in the far depths of the Boston Sheraton,” where he’s looking out a locked window into a maintenance court. The wind there is blowing gusts of snow erratically, and that observation recalls the manner in which Myer’s ashes were dispersed on “the shoreline at Winthrop.” That the speaker was there for the dispersal of the ashes marks him as friend or family. He connects the erratic wind blowing gusts of snow with the decision not to disperse Myer’s ashes to the “fickle winds,” but rather to place them on the shoreline at Winthrop for the ocean to claim. At first the speaker describes the way the ocean took the ashes “as if some timeless otherness proffered a passage home,” but quickly stops to search for a fresher, more startling image, one better suited to an elegy for a poet. He continues by describing the ocean taking the ashes as “a steadfast, sweaty partner, guiding you toward a crowded floor and music we can enter, but never understand.” That, to this reader, is a powerful merging of idea and image in a deeply moving, fully earned, final sentence.

What we find in “The Dance” is a dramatic monologue structured as a hybrid of fiction and poetry. The setting, the characters, the descriptive detail—these feel like the elements of a short fiction. The musical language, the vivid descriptive imagery, and the striking final metaphor of the ocean as a partner in a mysterious dance—these are the unmistakable elements of poetry.

There’s not a word in “The Dance” that doesn’t ring true. Now and then finding a poem like this, one that makes me feel and think, one that touches a deep, responsive chord—this is why I read poetry.