My Tango by a poet

Excerpted from the Gift
By Barry Sultanoff

Our dance was out of the ordinary - so much so that I was shaken by it. Something happened to me during those three minutes (or was it six?) that I danced with Vicky that will be with me as long as I live - and will seed my dreams at night and lighten my step by day.

"A child sings before it speaks, dances almost before it walks."

As I write, slightly scheming to infect you with the essence of tango magic, I can sense that since last night there is something new and alive stirring inside me. I feel the tickle of its tiny footsteps in my chest, treading ever-so-lightly, unnervingly close to my beat-skipping heart - and yet soothing somehow, a tango waterfall splashing in a deep cavern of some interior grotto. quietly cascading in the sleepy hollows of my soul.

Am I in love? With Vicky? With Tango music? With this awakening part of myself? How does such a pristine pleasure spring, as if by lyric design, from this seemingly simple exercise of connecting - two partners meeting, then moving in unison to the soulful sounds of the Bandoneon?

"A Media Luz" by Carlos Gardel

Can words ever describe that moment of complete surrender and the timeless minutes of connectedness that followed - the rhythm of movement then-pause that lured me, unresisting to an irresistible place that other tango dancers surely know, escorting me to a world of no boundary?

Is there some precious name for the energy that showed unexpectedly and volunteered its services, for the unbidden ally who carried me through the dance upon his confident shoulders, infusing me with his seasoned sense of chutspah - and setting my spirit aflame ...?

So that, not even knowing what steps I led, I led them masterfully - a man transformed, a man obsessed by the dance, eaten up by it, digested and reassembled into grateful, humming parts, like the wings of the bird by that name. Yes, a humming bird - his entire body a blur, alluringly invisible, hovering in flight, oiled by the love of the dance and now gliding, gliding.

"Nostalgias" by Placido Domingo

I understood more clearly now why I'd been willing to struggle through the early years of learning the tango.