If I could have been a dancer, a real dancer, beyond those years at St. Mark’s, I probably would have done it. But my gifts were not that lavish, and my considerable drive was directed toward more than just dance. I danced in college among many other activities, and by the time I was twenty-two my body—never slim, but nonetheless strong and capable and expressive and elegant—had begun its march away from that potential life.

Or so I remembered; my years-ago exchange with my college friend suggested otherwise. Into my mid-twenties, as I moved between cities for jobs and school, I found dance communities wherever I was. I would fib about my age, keeping myself a late teenager so that I could take the difficult classes in the professional training programs. The last of these episodes was in Philadelphia at the Philadanco school, where I was lucky enough to study with legendary teachers Denise Jefferson and Milton Myers, and Jimmy Truitte. Mr. Truitte was one of the very first practitioners of the Horton technique, so present and vital in the choreography and pedagogy of my favorite company, Alvin Ailey, and a technique that suited my body’s strengths much more than ballet or Graham technique.

We add countless words to our brains at an early age, and writing is the deep-sea fishing expedition to find them again.

The other classical techniques readily available for study. Ruthless self-assessment is crucial for an artist, and dance is where I learned it, the cool ability to assess strengths and weaknesses honestly and unflinchingly. I was strong and flexible, especially in my back. I did not have distinguished feet, merely adequate. I had excellent extension. My turnout was average, and my hips were stiff. I was a high jumper and wide leaper; I loved to cover ground. My feet were precise but not particularly quick. There is simply no point in being anything less than honest.

The writing life did take over, and it was the right one, and the years went by, and the dance life was done. I thought a lot about my dance life when I had children, at thirty-five and thirty-seven. It certainly wasn’t easy—why should anything so mighty be easy?—but it was efficient. I heard the voice of Mary Craighill: “Being a dancer is the best preparations for natural childbirth. You know how to ride the waves of pain, and you know how to breathe.”

I learned many things during my study of dance that have everything to do with the writing of poetry and the life of a poet. I have thought about the relationship between bending the body to music in dance and the way we move words on the page to make music. I have counted so many beats in my life in the middle of a dance studio that I think I just count, without thinking about it. The worn, wooden dance studio floor has a clear relationship to poetic form. It is an austere blank space upon and within which anything can happen. In the rectilinear studio, curves and patterns are made. The studio is literally the blank page. When there are no bodies or words in it, we start all over again.

The devotion to dance is daily. Every morning or every day you warm the body and bring it into the new day and its possibilities. You perform your ablutions, and each of those days adds up to weeks, and months and years add up to a technique that will be daily refined and daily coaxed and welcomed with a similar set of movements. There is no substitute for the work of today. There is no way around it. Dance taught me, in short, discipline, without which there is no art. The simple practices, the five positions, the same exercises done over and over again that mean the body can move, bend, make shapes, speak, fly.

I can still feel Mary Craighill’s sharp index finger in the small of my back, a drill between the shoulder blades, and then everything pulls up straight and comes into alignment, or Cara Gargano’s pinching my bottom cheeks together with equally sharp fingers and hissing in my ear, “Tighter,” as she prowls the room, her eyes which miss nothing lighting on each student, finding something, always something. Engage your center. Lengthen your spine. Drop your pelvis but do not tuck under. Lengthen. That is how you align your back and achieve a beautiful line. That is also how I smooth the bumps out of line of poetry. My body can remember doing so many things. We add countless words to our brains at an early age, and writing is the deep-sea fishing expedition to find them again.