SEASCAPE WITH THREE TEENS AND CHAPERONE
The storm cleared out the beach.
Waiting it out in the car,
we ate our sandwiches; as our breath
condensed against the window
Dwenne made in it a little sketch.
In the sky, a patch of blue came clear
and through the freshened overgrowth
—sea grape, cactus, palmetto—
we marched back. The waves’ green sheen
fluoresced beneath clouds’ amethyst.
A dusting of white from the dunes
had blown across the buckwheat grain
of flattened shoreline, conch shell grist,
on which Dwenne drew cartoons.
*
In Poussin’s allegory of the Seasons dancing,
the four hold hands, facing out,
as withered Time plays on a string
and one cherub like a trout
puckers, blowing bubbles, while another
stares dementedly at an hourglass.
Its disquieting hill of sand is neither
sand nor merely paint on canvas.
I saw the real thing, stood before it
as one stands before the ocean
absurd in glasses, hat, and lotion.
Across town was a honeymoon portrait,
on a Normandy beach, of Madame Seurat,
real sand mixed in its dot dot dot.
*
Seagulls like a Ballet of the Nuns
understood the theatre of the sky;
each yoked to the shape of the whole
conformed to an invisible force—
they were moving constellations
and held the spectator’s eye
as they performed a caracole
midair, more like a winged horse
made of many smaller wings
than a corps under a head command.
Yet the kids watched, entranced
as if a glamorous army had advanced
to a threshold, and with one raised hand
demanded they renounce all worldly things.
ADULT BALLET
One returns, to forms of humility
that begin with relevé. And then,
the teacher is younger than you.
The barre is anchored to mercury,
waists are ballasted by tutus. Resin,
darkening our soles with each tendu,
lends a hoof-like realism to leaps.
Laddered tights climb like pretenders.
These slippers that seem so tiny
on the closet floor are shallops
(“light sailboats used as tenders”)
floating us to a strange neoteny.
Rosé, vin gris, gris de gris—a leotard
is the color of skin contact wine.
The coolness is applied to parts in pain.
An earth sign, you believe in terroir:
vintages have horoscopes, or align
with transient bodies like comet champagne.
The need each of us has, to feel as though
we’re the turning axis of a world,
rivets us to the mirror by our own gaze.
A severe expression replaces the glow
with which our faces were impearled
in what they call our “salad days.”
One returns. Fantasies wear thin.
Late fall: evening and its leaf
and moss and mauve and bisque,
a mist as capacious as fiction
when suspension of disbelief
gives rise to a shaky arabesque.
❂
ANGE MLINKO’s latest collection, Venice, was just published in April by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her criticism appears in The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she teaches poetry.