Randall Ivey
Mama's Bolero
She had no training in classical music
nor much interest really except for
the usual melodic familiars,
“Claire de Lune” and a bit of Tchaikovsky.
Otherwise it was impenetrable to her
and perhaps “improper” for a girl
from the Pacolet Mills mill village
to engage in such hoity-toity stuff.
Later on, though, she came
to love Ravel, his “Bolero”
only, not from having heard it
in the Bo Derek movie. Lord no!
She would have blushed from all
that nudity and those naughty words.
No, it was from a Torvill and Dean
routine she first became familiar
With the steady, relentless percussion
and almost juvenile lines of the piccolos,
the drunken, nearly rude glissandi
at the end, like the laugh of a mad conquistador.
It all delighted her, enough to make her chuckle,
and hide her face in her hands as though ashamed.
There would be times during long car trips
we would have to hear it played again and again,
Until the rest of us, Daddy, my sister, and I,
would ourselves become dizzy from its rhythms
and beg to have the radio flipped back to Top Forty FM.
“It’s the beat,” she said. “I like the beat.”
She always had: heavy drums played expertly.
She liked dance too as long as it was others
dancing. She would never get out there herself:
Too shy and afraid of criticism.
Daddy had to force her up
from her safe chair at the club
to go to the floor and wind
back and forth to some innocuous
bit of pop or pseudo-country.
Anything faster than that
would have awakened her vertigo
and sent her back to her shell, red-faced.
