A pas de deux is a duet for two dancers, a piece in which two bodies are meant to move as one design. Dave Bonta's couple, though, "dance / on one leg," which sounds more like a three-legged race than a ballet. The poem is about closeness, and about how hard it is to stay present inside it. Its central idea is that a couple can tell lovely stories about itself while the actual togetherness is quietly going missing.
The opening stanza sets the tone with a sideways image: the pair "dine together on a tongue." The line is funny and a little unsettling. A tongue can be a cut of meat on a plate, but it is also the organ of speech and of kissing, so eating, talking and touching collapse into one picture. The line is also the smoothest in the stanza. It rolls along in something close to an iambic rhythm and stops on the blunt word "tongue," after the clipped "We dance / on one leg."
Then come two questions nobody answers: "Who is going to lay up / a box of rich things? / Who is enlarging his horse?" They sound like old proverbs or riddles, and the diction here and elsewhere feels borrowed from another era. I can't say where the phrases come from, but the effect is clear. The poem leaps from the intimate to the odd, hinting at saving up treasure and puffing up one's status, as if the speaker is asking what all this accumulating and showing off is for. The question marks leave the reader hanging, much like the dancers balanced on one leg.
The third stanza gives the poem its most vivid image: "glass stairs / to sudden fortune or to love." Glass is transparent and breakable, so the couple's climb is both exposed and risky. The word "or" is telling. Fortune and love sit side by side as if they were the same sort of luck, something that might arrive "suddenly" or shatter underfoot.
Notice, too, the repeated "We": "We dance," "We walk," "We meet." The poem leans on this plural pronoun, and the pattern makes the last turn hurt more. In the longest stanza the pair "make the best stories, / the most pleasant stories," and the superlatives sound a little too eager. The sample story is told in a stiff, almost courtly register: "on such / a night as this / she and I found some trivial business / and took occasion / to go to bed." The phrasing is coy. "Trivial business" and "took occasion" are polite euphemisms, and the line breaks slow the sentence down like a raconteur milking a punchline. Here the couple has already become "she and I," two separate people in a tidy anecdote, no longer a joint "we."
The ending drops the polish. "We meet / and desire to be here, / but I fear I cannot / (be here, desire)." The pronoun splits from "we" to "I," and the parenthesis behaves like a whispered correction. What can't the speaker do: be here, or desire? The grammar allows both, and the answer may be that the two are linked. Wanting someone depends on being present, and presence is exactly what he fears he lacks. The brackets even look like a small enclosure, a speaker retreating inside his own sentence.
There is no rhyme, and the line lengths swing between two-word fragments and long, talkative lines. That unevenness suits the poem's limping dance. Sound is used lightly: the hissing "best stories," "most pleasant" lingers like a satisfied sigh before the final stanza cuts it off.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. In a handful of short stanzas it moves from playful surrealism to a quietly honest confession. It suggests that the stories we tell about love can be warm and funny and still cover for a distance, and it lets the reader feel that distance without ever explaining it.