All 6 Uses

poise
in
Something Wicked This Way Comes
(Auto-generated)

So much the salesman, running before the storm, but poised here uncertainly, heard looking from face to face.†
Part 1
He remembered a greenhouse on a winter day, pushing aside thick jungle leaves to find a creamy pink hothouse rose poised alone in the wilderness.†
Part 1
Miss Foley waved, poised, took a step, and vanished into the mirror ocean.†
Part 1
Threshed tight, mortally locked and bound to Jim, staring up, Will was all the more shaken to see the normal boy, the airy glance, the unassuming poise, the small, the easy self in which no man at all was revealed by street light.†
Part 1
There, on the biggest stage, a tattoo needle poised like a blowgun dart in his rose-crusted hand, stood Mr Dark, the Illustrated Man.
Part 1 *

poised = relaxed and ready for action
The library, then, at seven-fifteen, seven-thirty, seven-forty-five of a Sunday night, cloistered with great drifts of silence and transfixed avalanche of books poised like the cuneiform stones of eternity on shelves, so high the unseen snows of time fell all year there.†
Part 2

Definitions:

(1) (poise)
calm, confident, and in control—especially in movement, behavior, or when ready to act
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
Much more rarely, poise is a technical word referencing a unit of dynamic viscosity.