—after watching Misty Copeland’s “Swans for Relief”
The freelance ballerina does not need your company. She doesn’t concern herself with the freshly shortened half-lives of your weeks’ complaints, but time falls quick and savage on her relevé.
She makes space for what she craves, then: cellos and tall fescue. Salmon, lime, and sunlight. This solitude sustains itself only because it’s not confined. The cygnet locks down, then up. Releases herself to sage and ozone. Binds herself to jetés and sobresauts performed on sand.
She solos on demand, paused and unpaused for 10,000 audiences of one. I could never have afforded the tickets I’d require to witness all these dancers in my life before, could never have replayed the freelancer’s flutter over and over outside a quarantine. We’ve neither of us change to throw.
Greedy, I trap her on my screen, my pocket nickelodeon—
I labor en pointe
solely in brute dreams, mute swan
leashed until the dark.
