Charles Tarlton
My Dream Dancer in the Mirror En Pointe
Always with me Tiny dancer in my hand – Bernie Taupin
I woke slowly from a dream, clinging to a fading image of a magnifying glass the size of a woman’s hand-held vanity mirror. The glass itself was smoky, but in it I could see a Degas ballerina poised to step off. As I watched in the fading dream, she rose up en pointe, and twirled away like a child’s top racing off the end of a string.
the ghost of Paris
outside a wall of loft windows
looked back at us
the paste-and-newsprint slipper’s toe
poised to lift the dancer up
smoke from chimney pots rose gray in a windless crépuscule, and blue curtains opened deliberately to invite the city in
My ears filled with Prokofiev from a dream gramophone as the ballerina picked up speed. I knew I was only dreaming, but I promised myself to remember everything, and as I awoke, she was still pirouetting en dedans, over and over, down in my specular glass.
fitful, half asleep
I kicked my blankets off
and strained to hold onto
the harsh smell of the dancer’s sweat
the rough scraping on the floor
dreams tear right through
the tight fabric of physics
tilt the world upside
down, tie osprey and seagulls
to the ground, make stones fly
Credits: Top Image is of Edgar Degas’ painting Dancer in Front of a Mirror, c. 1874-77, oil on canvas, 65 cm x 50 cm, Pushkin Museum, Moscow, “aussi Danseuse chez le Photographe.”
About the Author
Charles D. Tarlton is a retired professor who lives and writes (now) in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter.