Anything you try to pin down in "Dancing" has already stepped sideways. That is the poem's argument and also its method: a short piece about the impossibility of grasping meaning, written so that its own meaning stays just out of reach.
It begins with a threat that has no source. "Insistent whispers from distant places" tease and menace, and the near-rhyme of "places" and "menace" lets the sound itself hiss. We never learn who is whispering or from where, and the vagueness is the point. Then comes the first image of gripping: "the hold is held*." The repetition closes the phrase on itself like a small trap. The asterisk promises a note that this text doesn't supply, a footnote-shaped gap that suits a poem about things that refuse to resolve. What follows is a run of verbs that lose their shape. The hold "coils then melds, melts & is gone forever," and the m-sounds slide into one another so that the line dissolves as it says "melts".
The middle of the poem turns from sensation to philosophy. Objects are "solid & insubstantial," "whole & partial"; they "resist or yield." The ampersands do real work here. Instead of a plain "and," they act like hinges, fastening opposites together so tightly that neither wins. Reality, the poem suggests, doesn't choose between being firm and being vapor. The conclusion is unsettling: the effort to understand reveals "futility / to be both the cause & death of meaning." Wanting meaning brings it into being, and examining it kills it. The colon at the end of that line holds the thought up for a moment before the image arrives.
The image is the title. "Every answer / a more graceful dancer than the question." It is a neat reversal. We expect an answer to end a question, to be the partner who leads and finishes the dance. Here the answer is only better at escaping. The layout reinforces this. "Never ending" and "eternally" are pushed far to the right of the page, so the eye drifts away from the left margin like something slipping out of a hand. The "tension between existence & being" is the most abstract moment. Judging by the pairing, it points to a gap between simply being there and the felt experience of what that means, though the poem never defines either term, which keeps the idea as slippery as the rest.
The ending turns to sand. "It slips away, / eternally / within the reach, / of a grip that cannot keep what it holds." The paradox is that the thing is always within reach and never kept. The comma after "reach" cuts the phrase off from the "grip" it belongs to, so the syntax itself fails to hold. The echo of "hold" from the opening closes a circle without closing the argument. Then the poem shrinks its subject to "grains of sand in the hands of a creature / who doesn't understand / either…" The word "creature" is striking. It isn't "person" or "we," and it makes the holder small and almost animal, perhaps pitiable, and asks us to see ourselves from a distance. As for "either," the poem never says either what: the sand or the grip, the holding or the losing, the question or the answer. The ellipsis leaves it open, and the poem ends mid-thought, the way a dance carries on after the music has faded from the page.
Formally, this is free verse with no regular meter. Lines range from a couple of words to a full clause, and the rhythm lurches between clipped fragments and longer, trailing sentences. Sound echoes appear without forming a scheme: "held" and "yield," "ending" and "meaning." Patterns surface and dissolve, much like the "hold" the poem describes.
The idea that understanding has limits is an old one, and the poem's significance lies less in the claim than in the performance. It doesn't explain futility but enacts it, with grammar that slips, a footnote that leads nowhere, and a final word that waits for a partner who never arrives. Like its own answers, the poem is a better dancer than any question we might put to it.