Swan Lake

Somewhere in the middle of Swan Lake

She remembered that she was faking it.

She faltered, for a moment at the remembering

As if someone with a club had hit her

Upside the head, she remembered

That she lept when they told her to leap

And twirled where they told her to twirl

And she did it all as if she had no mind of her own.

The audience knew she was faking, too

As they sat like dour Olympic judges

Holding up invisible signs of judgment

Rating how she executed the traveling art of dance.

Ten thousand pleiets, a hundred thousand stretches on the bar

And all that twirling and bending with chalk on her hands

Until at last she bent to the right depth and form

Yet there was no swan in her, dying or otherwise.

She was only a little girl, making posings not poetry.

But as quickly as the remembered she forgot.

She stretched out her hand to the floodlights,

And she became a swan.

The body carried on without her

And she felt the agony of death, the hopefulness of love.

And the audience forgot her, too.

They gasped in the beauty of it—

Of the dying swan, of the delicate rose.

And all of them, crowd and performers

Were breathless with wonder before it.

And all became clear to her.

We are not what we are.

We are what we dream ourselves to be.

From Echoes from The Inner Mountains