THE PHOENICIANS

By Ann Goldsmith

Country western dances

twang-thump over the car radio

highway humming along

and Dal in red plaid shirt

square dancing.

On my way to my sister’s

darkened home, Dallas,

her husband who didn’t dance,

steps in style

to the strains of fiddle and guitar.

He holds himself as he did in life:

contained, exact, inborn rhythm

and a sly gleam. It’s plain

he is master of the do-si-do,

the tight turn, that he knows

how to swing his partner.

Yesterday, he hung onto the sheets

as if with his cold hands

he could hold back

the heavy swells rocking the bed.

But the storm threw him off.

The Phoenicians dreamed of gold

and fresh songs

waiting to be discovered

beyond the world’s edge –

so they sailed there.

It seems there is dancing as well

in that place, where anything

will do for a ship.

ANN GOLDSMITH will be the featured guest of the SUNY Empire State College Reading Series at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the college’s Niagara Frontier Center in the Appletree Business Park, 2875 Union Road, Cheektowaga. A former journalist and educator, she is the author of “No One Is the Same Again” (winner of the 1999 Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Prize) and “The Spaces Between Us,” published in 2010 by Outriders Poetry Project Press.

Poem submissions: The poems printed

in the Spotlight section of The Buffalo News

are selected by R.D. Pohl. Poems should be sent

to him at: R.D. Pohl, P.O. Box 641, Buffalo, N.Y. 14225.