Many ways to dance Giselle, but tonight as you
watch you think that she is what art is, creature
who remembers
her every gesture and senses its relation to the time
just a moment before when she did something
close to it
but then everything was different so what she feels
now is the pathos of the difference. Her body
hopping forward
remembers the pathos of the difference. Each
hop is small, but before each landing she has
stepped through
many ghosts. This and every second is the echo
of a second like it but different when you had
illusions not
only about others but about yourself. Each gesture
cuts through these other earlier moments to exist as
a new gesture
but carries with it all the others, so what you dance
is the circle or bubble you carry that is all this.
Frank Bidart, from Poetry, June 2007, p. 171.
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