Sestina – When She Danced
Who in the end imitates what? Nature or art?
This morning the forest imitated Monet indistinct,
Out of focus, untouchable in the morning fog.
Shafts of Caravaggio sliced between the trees at noon.
Like Degas she practices ballet on her bar,
Her hand alone distinct in motions that are not.
Realities unreal, filtered, real that is not.
Nature, the unchanging, changing to visions of art.
Lines written by a creek across a sandy bar.
A sonnet clear and clean with words indistinct,
In an alphabet that transforms with the sun at noon,
When Chiaroscuro shafts of sunlight burn the fog.
Her movements blurred creating impressions of fog,
Hard motion, graceful, softened the dance is not.
No sharp corners, definite shapes as the sun at noon,
The reality no longer defined but as the art.
Rigid choreography, blurred, flowing indistinct.
Impressions unanchored as her leg hides the bar.
Anchored by a hand, the only reality is the bar,
All the rest but beautiful shapes in the fog.
A rigidity of form, flowing, changing indistinct,
Solid unyielding perfection, in a cloud that is not.
Where is nature, reality in this mist of art?
Where are the soft shapes of morning at noon?
Light against dark, yellow and black at noon.
Flowing motion in a blur anchored by the bar.
Sliced up in black and hardened lines of art.
Mists rolled back into the cloud of fog.
A line of dark and light, reality that in truth is not.
A difference of night and day, between two indistinct.
She dances and the world is indistinct.
A world at midnight and at noon.
Real, touchable you think though it is not.
Impression in Chiaroscuro, the dancer and the bar.
A hard line of real, glimpsed through fog.
Nature, striving, in it’s way to be art.
She struggles against reality and it is art.
And nature answers in becoming one with the fog.
Dueling truth, between the dancer and the bar.