Remember those Degas paintings of the ballet dancers?
Here is a similar figure study, in muted color, but in this instance made
of words, not pigment. As this poem by David Tucker closes, I can feel
myself holding my breath as if to help the dancer hold her position.
The Dancer Class is over, the teacher and the pianist gone, but one dancer in a pale blue leotard stays to practice alone without music, turning grand jetes through the haze of late afternoon. Her eyes are focused on the balancing point no one else sees as she spins in this quiet made of mirrors and light —
a blue rose on a nail —
then stops and lifts her arms in an oval pause and leans out a little more, a little more, there, in slow motion upon the air.
Reprinted from the 2005 Bakeless Prize winner Late for Work, by David
Tucker, Houghton Mifflin, 2006, by permission of the author. “The
Dancer” first appeared in Visions
International, No. 65, 2001. Copyright
© 2001 by David Tucker. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry
Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited
poetry.
This article appears in Jun 22-28, 2006.
