‘Swan Lake’ with Dostoevsky

Watching Rudolf Nureyev & Margot Fonteyn

In Swan Lake pas de deux

On The Ed Sullivan Show, May 16, 1965

On YouTube, in black & white, on my iPhone 6

I watch & watch & watch

Wanting to see & then

I see

When Rudolf dances with Margot

He becomes Margot

This pas de deux is brief, so his

Attention is complete, he devours

What she shows: how to be her

He is almost there, & then is

Inside her

Owns what she needs, a swan

But when he dances alone as Prince Siegfried

He shows that he has a dream

We are not sure what it is, for

He hides loneliness inside beauty

Makes the body’s silence stunning

Because, in effect, we never know: are we loved?

To be loved by one particular person

It’s ridiculous to ask for this

He makes this silence stunning

With every step he renews the dream

Makes now into new

& keeps loneliness inside music

Sets a boundary between music & dance

& keeps ballet strictly inside the dream

Music is time, time, time

To die so suddenly, in ten minutes, six, now one

Lizaveta returning home by chance

With a big bundle in her hands

To find Raskolnikov with an axe

This silence is stunning

Because everything was

Thought through, rehearsed

Hundreds of times

To remove new from now

An awkward, quiet Lizaveta

remarkably tall with long,

somehow twisted legs

& a kind face & eyes

A kind of ugly duckling

Loved by all, loving to anyone

Asking nothing for herself

Her very last gesture, darling:

she brought her free left hand up

very slightly, nowhere near her face,

and slowly stretched it out

towards him—