Black Swan

March 8 2012

A ballerina

levitating, lifted,

in diaphanous pink

seamless slippers.

The dancer’s feet

attempting

the clean perfection

of a girlish silhouette,

free of earth;

that acquiesce

in the contorted ideal

of her esoteric art

 —  en pointe, glissade —

are ugly, sexless.

Broken, and hard

and immensely strong,

they are hideous instruments

in the cause of beauty.

But we watch from afar,

miss the sweat, the grunts

the wooden thump

of weightless jumps,

the frantic crush

in cramped and anxious wings.

The punishing routine,

and nagging hunger.

Suspend

our disbelief,

let artifice deceive;

lifted up

in the rush

of applause.

The ballerina sleeps

in her tiny apartment,

bleeding feet

wrapped in ice.

Dreaming sweetly

of unnatural acts.

Of standing ovations

triumphant encores.

Of lily-white swans

and a black impostor.

The title is an homage to the movie that inspired this poem.

The final line is key. Not so much by transforming the poem, suddenly shifting perspective, but that the line nails it shut:  like a lawyer to a jury, closing.

The black  swan is the white’s doppelganger:  conniving, seductive, stealing away her prince. And in the poem – as in the film – it stands in for the black underbelly of the performing arts, the deceptive artifice that conceals hard and precarious lives.