0
Six couples, each assembled from two unrelated popular songs, are set skating in a real Indiana town on a Friday night. Five of them arrive with their lines already written by somebody else. The sixth is the poet and his Muse, and they are the only pair still composing.
Dance has been a recurring subject in this catalog for years, but never before as a device for organizing other people’s work. The conceit is easy to state and hard to sustain: six couples, each built from two songs that have no business sharing a room, put on ice in a town of six hundred and given a dance style apiece. Holding that across six sections without the pattern going slack is the accomplishment here.
The pairings are argued rather than asserted, and the arguments are good ones. Roxanne and the Wanderer are matched because one song concerns a woman nobody sees properly and the other a man who never stays long enough to see anyone, which makes their tango a disagreement neither can win. Jolene and the Gambler share a subtler kinship. Both are figures we only ever meet through somebody else’s reading of their face, one described entirely by a frightened rival, the other surviving by showing nothing. That section closes on a card term used with real precision, a man who forgets to fold, and it lands because folding is the only philosophy that character has.
Then the structure turns. Five couples arrive already finished, their lines fixed decades ago, and they will skate them exactly as composed until the record ends. The sixth couple has no assigned style, because there is no choreography to assign. That reversal is what the preceding five sections exist to build, and it converts a clever exercise into a claim about authorship: being quoted is a kind of afterlife, and writing is something else entirely.
The closing movement earns its quiet. The rink empties one pair at a time, each named by whatever defined them, and the final image hands the marriage a piece of physics instead of a compliment. A blade grips because it meets resistance, so friction is what makes the glide possible at all. The coda then leaves the barn entirely, pointing toward Chumbawamba and a Wisconsin creek and a private name the reader is never given, which is the correct way to end a poem about the distance between borrowed stories and lived ones.
I just read your poem “Shipshewana” from the July contest. I dug, heavily. It’s a wonderfully imaginative poem filled to the brim with atmosphere. I especially enjoyed how the familiar songs and characters are transformed into vivid skating couples, each with their own personality, tension, and kind of love. The imagery is colorful and cinematic, making the Barn feel almost magical against the quiet Amish town. The final focus on the Muse and HoneyBeeBard adds a heartfelt, personal touch that ties the whole piece together beautifully. There’s a lot of creativity and genuine affection for the world being created here.
The poem is very realistic. The way the poet uses writing techniques such as “enjambment” and “caesura” makes the poem a great piece of work. I like the creativity.
More ambitious than anything else in the catalog attempts, and mostly successful. The three-part scaffold repeated six times is the engine of the poem and also its main risk: by the fourth section a reader knows the shape of what is coming before reading it, and Rhiannon and Levon suffer a little for arriving after three stronger pairings. The italic stanzas closing each section carry the real writing, and several are excellent, particularly the Jolene passage and the final Muse section. Section VI justifies the whole apparatus by breaking it, which is the hardest thing a poem of this design has to do. Three small proofreading items should be settled before this goes live, listed in the production notes below.
The barn sits red against a dark so complete it swallows every headlamp but its own — downtown Shipshewana asleep by nine, quilt shops shuttered, harness shop shuttered, only the Big Red Barn still burning, throwing rink-light out across the gravel like something that doesn’t belong here and has been welcomed anyway.
Inside: ice, and organ-hum, and couples who were never supposed to meet, pulled off forty-fives and out of transistor radios and set loose on skates.
Who they are: She’s swamp-water trouble, all sideways smile and don’t-care hips. He’s the boy with the guitar slung like a rifle, famous before he’s old enough to shave.
Why they belong together: Neither one of them has ever stood still for anybody. Put two people like that in the same room and they don’t fall in love so much as catch fire off each other.
The dance: A rock-and-roll jive — fast edges, reckless crossovers, nothing about it careful.
She comes off the wall like a struck match, he meets her already burning — two loud hearts keeping the same reckless time, skates scraping sparks nobody planned for, gravel-voiced and grinning, not one bit afraid of falling.
Who they are: She works under red light and wants better for herself than the street gave her. He’s the rambling man who’s loved a hundred girls in a hundred towns and never once stayed.
Why they belong together: They shouldn’t. That’s the point. One’s aching to be seen for more than what men pay for; the other can’t sit still long enough to see anyone at all. Their dance is the argument they’ll never finish having.
The dance: A slow, contained tango — close hold, sharp turns, a lot said in very little space.
He holds her like a man rehearsing goodbye, she lets him, chin high, eyes older than her years — two people orbiting the same small square of ice, touching, turning, never quite landing, because wanting somebody and staying for them have never once been the same step.
Who they are: She’s the woman so beautiful other women beg her not to notice their man. He’s the stranger who reads faces for a living and never once shows you his own.
Why they belong together: Both of them get by on what people project onto them — desire, fear, hope — while keeping the real self folded up small and private. Two people fluent in being watched, finally watching each other instead.
The dance: A slow smoldering waltz, cat-and-mouse phrasing, held glances that do more work than the footwork.
She circles him the way flame circles paper, unhurried, certain of the outcome — he deals his eyes like a hand he’s played before, and still, just this once, forgets to fold, two practiced faces going soft at the edges.
Who they are: She rings like a bell through the night and belongs to no one, a woman made half of myth. He’s a man named for a river, carrying a name passed down like inheritance, half legend himself before he’s lived a day of it.
Why do they belong together: Neither is fully of this world. Put two people like that on the ice and the rink stops looking like a rink — it looks like a place ordinary people wandered into by accident and can’t explain afterward.
The dance?: Ethereal freestyle — long unbroken glides, arms like something the wind is doing, more ballet than sport.
She moves like weather no one forecasted, he answers her the way a name answers being called — both of them borrowed from lightning and thunder, skating a zig-zag shape the ice will remember long after the lights go out.
Who they are: She’s the girl every guy at the sock hop wants for the next dance, easy and golden and fun. He’s the smooth-talking Duke, dressed sharp, working the room like he owns it, all charm and no danger in it.
Why they belong together: This is the one couple in the barn with nothing to prove and nothing to hide. Just two people who like each other and like being looked at liking each other. Everybody needs one couple like that at the party.
The dance: Bouncy doo-wop couples skate — hand spins, matching footwork, big open smiles for the room.
“Ba-ba-ba, ba Barbara Ann”, they spin it, laughing, his hand finding hers on every downbeat, nothing complicated about this one, just two kids who found the one good thing at a Friday night dance and decided to keep it simple.
Who they are: She’s the one he’s been writing toward for every unnamed line that came before her — the Muse who turned out to be a woman, not a metaphor. He’s the Bard who spent years unwriting his existential self, burning in deserts, wishing on pennies, before he understood what he was actually asking for.
Why they belong together: Every other couple on this ice is borrowed from a song somebody else wrote. These two wrote each other. He didn’t find a character to match her — he found the person the songs were rehearsing him for. That’s the difference between a good match and a marriage of two makers.
The dance: No set style. They stop performing for the room somewhere around the second turn and just skate — her hand finding the small of his back, his voice low near her ear, more conversation than choreography, the kind of dance that doesn’t end when the music does.
Everyone else skates a story that was written for them. These two are still writing. He nuzzles some half-finished line against her hair, she answers it before he’s found the word, and the ice holds them longer than it holds anyone, not because they’re better dancers, but because neither one of them is in a hurry to be anywhere else. The friction is a dance.
On a late Friday night, a Norman Rockwell painting wandered into the American songbook and discovered that every old 45 rpm record has a life after midnight…on the square in Shipshewana.
Outside, the Amish businesses keep their dark and their quiet, lanterns long since blown out, buggies waiting patient at the rail. Inside the Big Red Barn, six kinds of love keep circling on blades thin as the difference between them.
One by one the borrowed couples skate their songs out to the end and step off, breath fogging, laughing, gone—Suzie Q and her wild-eyed guitar man, Roxanne and the wanderer who couldn’t stay, Jolene and the gambler folding his hand at last, Rhiannon and her river-named king, Barbara Ann and the Duke, still ba-ba-ba-ing on their way out the door—until it’s just the rink lights, the hum of the organ winding down, and two skaters who were never doing a bit for anybody, Lady Muse and the HoneyBeeBard, the last two on the ice, in no rush at all to let this song end.
As the barn lights fade, the ice melts, the organ fades, and my heart keeps time with the Muse. A legendary couple, still writing their song.
On the ride home:
Shipshewana, more than a Friday Night Delight.
Where love originates in candlelight.
Next week we’ll take a trip to Chumbawamba, do some simple Tubthumping.
Then journey to Oconomowoc, where the Muse knelt, and gathered some singing water while splashing and laughing walking down a pebbled creek.
Ahh,
so satisfying when the lights dim. As the clippity clop of the hooves take us home.
Where Dutchie waits…
Does inspiration derive from the void? No. It’s
Somehow, Someway, Someday, Somewhere, Someone, Something, Sometime, Somehow..
When you know the final line before you
For the inspiration behind every: Ha! for Her
The personal version: one of individual love. Lyric
CooooooooBaaaaaaaaa! Logically, Geographically, Culturally, Linguistically, Legally, Economically, Strategically,
Santa readies his sleigh, laden with gifts— and
You’re a good-looking woman. Terribly full of logic.
Barefoot at winter’s fading light, I dance—unrobed, unafraid.
Time The first fire. Is my friend And
Launched at 120425;3:26AM. I fell asleep dreaming peacefully
Death—Rebirth Requiem—Resurrection Life—Forever The veil of life, lifted-
The Solitaire RazzleDazzleBerry on a Plate. A picture
Drunk— in misery and eternal sadness my life
After an excellent workout, the creative side overwhelms—
My Lovely Lady In your lovely ways, you
A deliciously delightful distraction of conversation for a
Note: this started with a conversation with my
What’s more exacting? The physical act of painting?
Burning Man The festival that embodies temporary community,
A Spiritual Tome following the Dance of the
(Self-Portrait–A Veritable Fable) The HoneyBeeBard Always in search
A life-changing trip … A fifteen-minute read. From
A life-changing trip … A fifteen-minute read. From
My Personal Greek Tragedy Diamonds of Reflection (Prologue:
Poetry Inspiration flows from every direction – sometimes
Dave’s Acronyms Akronyms. Akronomeous. Akrogreek, Akroignoramuse. Meaningless words,
Waiting to be explored That amazing sense of
Howdy! What’s on your mind? I had this
Very little food for two days Scared to
A view of you Pleasing, pleasing, very pleasing
A Muse Threads that Flux and Contact with
