The Dance Student

We wound our bodies up at nine a.m.

alternating blue and green leotards

for the days of the week,

black on Fridays when the toe blisters

were raw from a week of pirouettes,

braids of muscle clenched along the spine.

I stood on the end facing the corner-mirror

so when Shirley played the sonorous plié

from behind the helm of the piano

and our arms carved the cold air in unison,

it looked like one woman twelve layers deep.

The snow fell heavy and slow

down the length of the windows

as our legs extended, hollow of inner ankle

nesting on the barre and we slid

along the curve of wood in wide splits

torquing our hips into a new architecture.

Against the landscape of mirror,

our audience was reflection, all stance and blur,

eyes huge against the pull of onion-buns,

January faces ashen, restrained.

Who knows the moment

when we are most real to ourselves?

At five, I stared at myself

in a pantyhose display at the Kmart,

stacked wall of mirrored L’Eggs,

a hundred misshapen faces gazing back.

Or during the silent snip of haircuts

hair wet and matted to the scalp,

arms folded beneath the black cape

until she handed over the hand mirror and circled

me around to approve the back of my head.

One Friday we got to end class

flat on our backs, all spun-out,

tights damp and pulling at the crotch.

Above us a baroque painting of cherubs

floating against a scrim of brown-black.

Some nuns at the college petitioned

the painting be removed and a puff of blue clouds

was crudely oiled over three penises.

What a relief to be past the adagio,

petit allegro, sweep of grand jeté,

past falling off-balance, the wash of pain

held in our line of watchful faces.

I still feel that papery dancer fighting against her bones,

that oblong child repeated in a row of eggs

like they will perpetually be peering out

for a sign of recognition,

some rough nod of approval

from the surface of things.

White October

You cannot let go the embered,

cinnamon and rust,

everything husked and shaking off

yellow paper skins,

the hay-sweet evening, auburn and cold,

that comes with a seasonal childhood.

You search it in the late October skyline

but here the day is all white,

ethereal as it wisps over the skirted mountains.

You could lose yourself in there,

crawling the car around coast cliffs,

edges softening, and all the ways

you’ve ever wished for disappearance

lower down in veils,

take a fragment of memory or desire

back up to the sky

as you stare into the perpetual duskiness

of the ocean, steely water wrinkling

and unwrinkling its surf and glide.

You’re searching for a little

fire, anything aglow

on the mauve-brown bluffs,

but that’s not the point

this blurred world is making,

this white October with its white pumpkins

and pearly pampas grass.

The message is thin as a plume

but it’s something about surrender,

something about how your need is a shade less

in this rush of cloud.

The person you love is beside you

and the rest of your life is a big question—

it’s something about the cornsilk wings

of one two three hawks

swooping low in front of you

and dissolving into the mystic.