Orpheus Parties With Modern Dancers Poem by Leonard Kress

They eat and sleep and bathe in a crazed mansion,
entire lives one uninterrupted rehearsal,
under the arched flexed foot of their German
master, Helmut, who brought with him all
of German Expressionism—his own
face a blank and horrid mask. They play
James Brown to help their bashful guests get down,
but slap and cluck their own rhythms, deploy

post-modern moves like dancing off the beat
and sending spasmic chains across the dance floor,
paroxysms of grief augmenting summer heat.
You try your best to move amid the shirtless roar,
baffled this strange new hierarchy
that someday soon will shred you to the core.