Little Dancer of Fourteen Years

One day, you will board the train at Union Station.

Your father will give you ten dollars for the snack car

and tell you something about engines & energy conversion.

You will sip hot chocolate, maybe sugared tea, through

two Niagara Falls towns, on both sides of the border.

You will spend the night at a hotel in Hudson—

your mother read about that place in a novel before you were born.

After the whaling museum, it is a short trip to New York City.

In The Met, you will give your parents the slip

somewhere near the Hellenistic and Roman sculpture atrium.

Upstairs, you will find yourself at a little bronze statue—

her bouffant tutu, silk hair ribbon, feet in adolescent fourth position—

and you will understand something about poetry.

Your mother did not understand poetry until your birth.

That place: the IV glissade, warm blanket—heavy on the belly—

epidural tubing in the spinal cord like Wilis wings or La Sylphide.  

The scalpel through layers and layers in the operating theatre. 

Your parents’ pas de deux: new baby, hands cradling your neck,

stork bite birthmark, sleepy-eyed child belonging to winter & spring,

ten tiny fingers broken free from their swaddle.

At night, sleepless child, your father will walk and walk

and walk so you do not cry. 

Days later, your mother almost dies—like Jane Seymour, she’ll later say,

then think to show you the American Ballet Theatre perform 

Antony Tudor’s Jardin aux lilas on YouTube.

And you both understand something about ballet.

Emily Bulicz-Arnelien