In her own words...
"Trapeze"
2006
It leans on me, this changing season,
breathless as these old photographs
under the lamp. White smiles will
smile forever; the tossed ball is fixed in
space and will not move, nor will
divers, diving, ever touch water.
Even the leaves outside my window
do not move. Gilded now, they pose:
picture perfect leaves posing for me---
or for whoever, looking up, tomorrow,
might happen to see their trapeze act:
the wave to the crowd, a flutter and
spins in rising air for the letting go;
then the vertiginous game with sudden
wind, yellow skirts lifted in spiraling
exuberance before the plummet.
About this work
“Trapeze” was published in Southwest Review, Vol. 91, no. 3 (2006), p. 342. It is also included in Dorothea Tanning's book, Coming to That: Poems, New York: Graywolf Press, 2011, p. 7, and may not be reprinted without the publisher's permission.