Footage
Stephen Petkus
His dancers harry
dimensions of air
and welcome the floor
like flying squirrels
returning with nuts
from the canopy.
Think of their leaps as smiles,
great grins in firm love
with the serious spots
where feet land, stick
for moments and make
molecular friends
before springing, improved,
once more into the catapult
of channeled uncertainty
and pulling from gravity
the way Alwin “Just
Call Me Nik” Nikolais rises
in the President’s box, kisses
his fingers and throws his palms
to the audience. As though
dispensing spores, hopeful
specks first nurtured there,
in the air above the seats,
then huffed out the vents
toward a gathering impossible
to predict: some charged bounty
like the hot kernels
swirling in a rough pan
at the dawn of agriculture,
no one around that fire
quite anticipating the crack
and vector of the very first
popcorn—surprise
projectiles, then
the hands reaching out.
After watching a clip of Alwin Nikolais’s “Tensile Involvement”
performed at the Kennedy Center Honors, 1987
For Joelle, who danced for Nik
The awards presentation and dance this poem refers to can be found here, where the directly relevant part begins around the 7:00 mark.
Stephen Petkus works as a high-school librarian in New Jersey and lives in the Hudson Valley. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. Steve’s poems have appeared in Puerto del Sol, I-70 Review, Tar River Poetry, CutBank, and many other journals. He has work forthcoming in descant and Thirteen Bridges Review. Steve’s full-length manuscript was recently named a finalist for the American Poetry Review’s Stern Prize.