Mike Stone's "Dance" opens with a sentence that sounds almost like a shrug: "We all have such small lives." What follows is a bleak account of how little we manage to say to one another. Then, after a pause, the poem changes mood so completely that its own rhythm starts to move differently.
The first section is built from deflating images. Our bodies are "the taut or sagging leather" that encloses us, a phrase that treats skin as a hide or a bag and flesh as packaging. Clothes are "a few colored rags," worn "to make us seem a little larger / To others whose lives are similarly small." The joke is quietly cruel. We dress up for audiences who are just as shrunken as we are, so the whole performance of being impressive is staged for people too small to be impressed. The word "similarly" is the sting: nobody is exempt, and the "we" never lets the reader stand outside.
Communication fares no better. Desires are hurled "in flimsy metal sails from no place to nowhere / And back." The poem doesn't say what these vessels are. Judging by the imagery, they could be ships, planes or cars, but the vagueness suits the point, which is journeying without a destination. Speech is reduced to the verb "mouth," as if we only shape words with our lips, sending "empty waves of air to ears that don't understand." Sound becomes mere air. The next lines are the bleakest and the plainest: "We say hello, we say goodbye. / It's all the same word." A greeting and a farewell, the start and end of every relationship, collapse into one noise.
Then comes "And then there's dancing," and the poem's whole texture changes. Up to here the lines have been long and sprawling, full of qualifying clauses. Now they shrink to commands and fragments: "Then twirl around." "Stop - arms raised." "Head bowed." The grammar behaves like choreography. Stone even lets the line break do some of the dancing: "one step back behind / Long, almost a curtsy" makes the retreat itself feel like a bow, a small courtesy built into the movement. There is no rhyme anywhere, and none is needed, because repetition does the work rhyme would do. "Another step forward, another back / Behind then twirl and stop" restates the first pattern with slight variations, as a dancer repeats a phrase of steps. By the last movement, "Raised and bowed and dip," even the grammar has come loose. Two participles and a bare verb sit side by side, as if the language can no longer bother with tense and is simply moving.
The dance also quietly answers the earlier failures. The metal sails went "from no place to nowhere / And back," and the dancer too steps forward and back. Yet here the back-and-forth has shape, a beginning, a pause and a gesture, where the other journeys had none. Words were "empty waves of air" that no one understood. The dancer's raised arms and bowed head say something with no sound at all, and nothing in the poem suggests that anyone fails to follow. Even the body changes role. In the first stanza it was a container that held us in, and here it becomes the instrument of expression.
The last line, "Is he the dancer or the dance?", is the poem's one real surprise. After all those "we" statements, a single "he" appears, and the question refuses to settle. The line recalls Yeats's famous "How can we know the dancer from the dance?", though the poem gives no sign of whether Stone meant the echo. One reading is that the dancer, absorbed in pattern, loses the small self that was the problem in the first place. Another is that the dance needs a person to exist at all. Stone leaves both open.
That openness is part of what makes the poem worth reading. It doesn't pretend small lives are secretly large, and it doesn't cure loneliness with a tidy moral. It simply points to one human activity in which a body, instead of hiding in its leather and rags, becomes meaning, and it lets that gesture stand.