She makes fragile comparisons.
Wheedling battle wounds and horror stories from her mother, the dancer, and her father, the comedian.
She stares in the mirror, examining curves to come and curves already arrived,
Survive.
Bitterly swallowing the curse of age with as much dignity as she can suffer,
Is she the starlet, the chorus, the other?
Shadowed woman bleeding ash,
All things that rise must pass.
Is she the ballerina, the comedian,
The singer, the chameleon?
Will she seek solace in an arabesque,
A monologue, some dialogue a stranger wrote,
Breathing heavily with every note,
Will she?
Transcending the ash, mending the time,
Bending the world to reason and rhyme,
Can she?
She makes fragile comparisons.
The skeleton beneath betrays the skin she has destroyed in her wrath.
She sighs to an invisible audience, phantom applause
Greeting every word and every pause.
Melody in her tears and discord in her laugh,
As if cremating the corpse she will become,
Or has become, or won’t become.
As if reimagining chaos with one plié,
Six feet beneath a night at the ballet.
She makes fragile comparisons,
A second to the thrill,
And all the world could be a stage,
But every one is still.