Astaire Index

By Blog Entry Title

(with sonnet names in parentheses, if different from entry title)

Fred and Ginger and Fred

(Gotta Find You; Night and Day 1)

Dance with Me

(Change Partners; And You Must Be In Them!)

Hard to Handle

(Let's Begin; Semastaire)

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

No Strings

(Fancy Free)

Cheek to Cheek

(Heaven)

Song and Dance Man

I Am Too Much Protection Enough

One, Two, Three

When Do You Start Stop

(Never Only Going)

Why Not Face the Musicians Now?

(Just the Way; By the Light)

Turning in the Light

We Always Win

(You're On; Old Father)

Dancing with Machines

Hommage to Bill

(Bojangles of Harlem)

So, but I Have the Key!

(Swing Time)

Princess Adelaide

Foot Light

(Three Little Words)

Type, Tap; Battle, Slap

(Battle Taps)

Or that You Might Have Had Him

(The Kiss We Shared)

Dream Time, Dream Time

(Night Taps)

Where Have You Been?

(Caught)

And While We Still Have the Chance

(And Dance)

She Buries All Her Beauty in Your Face

(Infinite Gentleman)

Flying Tiger

Man and Wife

Lily Padding

No, Dance

Music Makes Her

Music Makes Him

Night and Day 2

Sleight-of-Man

There isn't going to be

Articulation

Wont Dancer

We Are Jerry Travers


By Film

(Note: the poems are not always neatly assigned to a particular movie)

Flying Down to Rio (1933)

Gay Divorcee (1934)

Roberta (1935)

Top Hat (1935)

Follow the Fleet (1936)

Swing Time (1936)

Shall We Dance (1937)

Carefree (1938)

The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939)

The Sky's the Limit (1943)

Three Little Words (1950)

The Band Wagon (1953)

We are Jerry Travers

Silence in the rooms: you’re sitting low,
folded in the angles of your frame,
swallowed by upholstery like some
spider trapped inside a marshmallow;

your eyes belie the tenor of your limbs
drawn like bowstrings to a fever pitch
rustling in the papers and on which
you walk away like nitro glycerin.

A moment as you pause upon the stair,
proscenium of silence to the tomb
of Europe, buried in its potent state.

You thrust your hands in pockets lined with air
and throw a rasp of taps into the gloom,
then slam the past behind you like a gate.

Synchronic melody

Say it all goes, the gift cards and the candles,
the glitzy paperbacks with their newspaper stock,
the city itself, the pigeons out the windows,
and every evanescent moment, lost.

There would still be the fact of that boy in the street,
his impossible protests, the cant of his mind,
the bend of his knees and his blindingly sweet
take on the halt and the sick and the blind.

I’m too beat to care but I strongly suspect
the fathers and scholars and hermits were right:
everything’s packed to the opposite side

waiting for us to cross over, intact.
As likely that as that we sprang from night
into this catastrophe of paradise denied.