My mother tells me
that when she can’t fall asleep
she puts on Shostakovich
and imagines a ballerina
dancing. I don’t tell her
I have the same dream, asleep
and awake. Neither of us
has ever pliéd or pirouetted
or had a man cup
the slenderest cut of our waist
as we dove into an arabesque
while the orchestra
swelled beneath us
like a tide. Neither of us
has ever danced
like that, like wind
on a moonful of poppies.
Neither of us has ever
been silk, slipper, porcelain.
Her childhood was rotten—
her father raised hell,
molested kids, picked scabs
on the bellies of sins.
Neither of us knows
the great composers and how
they possessed those violins
to sound like stars falling
through fingers. I knew
my father’s slurred rendition
of “Runaround Sue,” the hollow
sound his pick made when
he dropped it in the black hole
of his guitar, said god dammit.
Neither of us has ever
been a chant on the breath
of the body, a heavenly
thing. How did we dream
in double, find ourselves
in the pale spotlight
of the same enchantment?
How did sleep find us, finally,
as our skirts whirled
on the edge of nothing?