SWAN LAKE IN MIST
(Honouring the unforgettable ballerina of New York's sixties Miss Marta C Gonzalez)
It could be an old book.
A sudden sound and you rise.
Your easy chair is still unsure,
swinging tentatively, air held
among the pages of books.
A past bares like taking off
shirt soaked with patches, memory.
A broken petal, uncertain and yellow,
tending to muddy ochre, could be
the sun shaking an orange finger
through bamboo rafters. A feather,
apparently blue Jay. A drop of past.
You loved lavender, I gold. After a peck
you decide - that's poisonous dye.
To your unfocused zaded mind
floats in a coil of music
from afar, distant time,
forgotten steps, lyrical limbs,
fragments of applause rising
like murmuring smoke
fill her soul, in mind she rises -
a swan. The body immobile,
wheel chair on brake,
swan wings afflap, go along
languid streams, dancing in rhyme
with the sweet sound of warblers,
hundreds, thousands, millions,
white napkins of her lovers fill the sky.
Has come the deciduous season,
leaves, fruits, flowers fallen away,
but the fall not in air. Roots are dying,
the delicate trunk that had gathered
girth, has shrunk back to a skeleton,
the svelte into C-flat, a search has failed
to locate solidity, lost in emptiness of a pod.
Marta C Gonzalez was, in her prime, one of the world's best ballerinas. She was New York Ballet Company's Prima Ballerina in the 1960s. She had Alzheimer's for many years, and passed away in 2019. Just before her death, she was given headphones to hear Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, which she had performed in 1967. See her reaction. The power of music is incredible.
Prabhanjan K. Mishra writes poems, stories, critiques and translates, works in two languages – English and Odia. Three of his collected poems in English have been published into books – VIGIL (1993), Lips of a Canyon (2000), and LITMUS (2005).His Odia poems have appeared in Odia literary journals. His English poems poems have been widely anthologized and published in literary journals. He has translated Bhakti poems (Odia) of Salabaga that have been anthologized into Eating God by Arundhathi Subramaniam and also translated Odia stories of the famous author Fakirmohan Senapati for the book FROM THE MASTER’s LOOM (VINTAGE STORIES OF FAKIRMOHAN SENAPATI). He has also edited the book. He has presided over the POETRY CIRCLE (Mumbai), a poets’ group, and was the editor (1986-96) of the group’s poetry magazine POIESIS. He has won Vineet Gupta Memorial Poetry Award and JIWE Poetry Award for his English poems.He welcomes readers' feedback at his email - prabhanjan.db@gmail.com
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