Nobody looks graceful in a first tai chi lesson, and Mary F. C. Pratt's speaker begins by admitting it. Over four short "lessons" she moves from clunking self-consciousness to a brief, hard-won calm. The poem is about learning a physical discipline, but its real subject is what that discipline does to a restless mind. Learning the movements slowly becomes a way of pushing "the unneeded aside" and of shutting out noise that is inside her as well as in the street.
The opening lesson sets up the gap between teacher and pupil through clothing and sound. The teacher is "elegant in blue silk and red slippers"; the speaker is "stupid in my rolled-up jeans." Colour and fabric are set against denim and "heavy shoes," and the verbs "clunk and stomp among the stones" are as clumsy as the feet they describe, their hard consonants landing like boots on cobbles. The setting matters too. This is an alley "in the center of town," an ordinary public place rather than a quiet studio, and the speaker is embarrassed to be seen there.
The poem's most inventive move is its use of the capitalised posture names, which are traditional names of tai chi movements. Pratt does not quote them as a list. She builds them into her own grammar, so that "I try to Brush away the thick distractions / around my Knee" is both an instruction and a confession. The names work as metaphors for her inner state. When she writes "I Drive the Monkey a little bit Away, / chatter a little less," the monkey is a posture, but it is also the chattering mind, and the line makes the two the same thing. The animals also give an alley in a modern town a wilder, older landscape: horses, cranes, a rooster, a bird with "glossy feathers."
Lesson Two shows the technique at its most delicate. The line break after "When I" holds her in suspense before she can "Grasp the Bird's Tail," and the repeated "almost" ("almost I can believe… almost I can feel the lightness of her bones") shows the imagination just reaching a state the body hasn't yet earned. Lesson Three then undercuts it. The easy posture, "Wave my Hands / Like Clouds, all day!", gets an exclamation of pleasure. But the next movements arrive as a jerky list of separate lines ("Kick with Right Foot, / Grab Opponent's Ears with Both Fists, / Kick with Left Foot"), and the white space between them makes the reader feel the stop-start effort. The martial vocabulary of "battle" and "opponent" suggests that what she is fending off is partly herself. The word "settle" returns here, after appearing in the first two lessons ("settle down to Play the Lute," "let me settle on her back"), as a question: "Will I never settle down?" Each time she wants to settle, a little more than she is able to.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its rhythm comes from the length of its lines, which stretch and shorten with the movements. That freedom suits a poem about the difference between forcing a pattern and letting it take hold.
The last lesson is where something changes. The speaker now sees herself from outside, as "Western lady," moving "too fast" and trying to "remember what's next." Then comes the turn: "But today she doesn't care / if people walking past the alley stop / to smile." Embarrassment, the feeling that opened the poem, has gone. The plain statement "These things require attention" is the poem's quiet thesis, and the "frail barrier" she makes "between my body / and the noise of traffic and machines" is carefully modest. Even her ability to push things aside is only something she "imagine[s]" is possible. The final image, "Acting to Close a Door wide open too long," suggests that she has been too open to every distraction, and the closing posture, "so much like beginning again," makes the poem circular, ending where practice always starts.
The poem is significant because it avoids the usual story of triumphant mastery. The speaker never becomes the "sturdy Golden Rooster." She learns that attention is something you practise and lose and begin again, and that is why the poem rings true.