Quick Change
backstage at The Nutcracker
The oboe sighs its last insinuation.
Applause. I tense. I ought to hear her bare
feet in the hallway. Flutes start shrilling. There!
The harem-girl trots up for transformation.
I fight the hooks-and-eyes and perspiration
that hold her clothes on. Something rips. I swear.
Applause. No time. I hurriedly prepare
her tights. The music’s much too fast. Damnation!
Applause. Just one more song to go, and I’m
still fumbling with the buckle of her shoe!
We hoist the massive, domelike skirt in place.
I fasten it.
Applause. I paint her face
with Mother Ginger’s clown-lips, just in time.
From gorgeous to grotesque, so fast.
From gorgeous to grotesque, so fast. So true.
First published in Lucid Rhythms.
Since this poem bewildered a lot of people, I should note that there is applause between each of the following variations in Tchaicovsky's Nutcracker
ballet: Arabian dancers (Coffee), Chinese dancers (Tea), Russian dancers (Candy Canes), French dancers (Mirlitons - Marzipan Flutes), Mother Ginger/Gigogne and her Polichinelles (Ginger Snaps - small clown-children who emerge from her giant skirt). Traditionally, Mother Ginger is played by a man in drag, but in my daughters' youth ballet she was usually played by a teenaged girl who had also been cast as an Arabian dancer.
Here's a sequel, a few years later:
Final Performance
backstage at The Nutcracker
(2011)
It hurts to watch her watching them. It's plain
she'd love to join the other girls her age--
the dainty, tutued Mirlitons onstage.
Her clownish greasepaint doesn't hide her pain.
She's next. Her heavy hoopskirt will contain
Polichinelles...and yellow-purple-sage
bruising down one leg. I try to gauge
her stamina. I only ascertain
her stubbornness. She knows this is the last
Nutcracker her failing heart will give her.
The music starts. She radiates delight.
I smile. Then freeze. Miss Sylvia recast
that high-kicked skip as walking. Jenn! I shiver.
She'll high-kick if it kills her. And it might.
She'd just had a heart catheterization a few days before, hence the bruising down her leg (it had gone in through a femoral artery). Thanks to her heart donor, my elder daughter is now a college graduate, married, and living happily in Toronto.
Depending on how much time you have, someone whose name rings a bell also published
a very long poem inspired by Leonard Bernstein's
Chichester Psalms.