Collected poetry of a lifetime can be so easily lost in drawers unopened and piles thrown out subsequent to the trauma of a family members passing. This book represents my effort to arrest that likelihood. Although some of this collection has been published in journals and anthologies, those vehicles fade into the dustbins of time. My hope is that The Second Dance will be kept and read at least by my family members for a generation or two. Anytime we drove past a cemetery my father used to say, there rest the bones of the people the world couldnt do without. I share no such delusion. When my role on this stage ends I will joyfully exit leaving only a few lines behind. These are those lines.