Poems by Jessica Wilkinson ​

SWAN LAKE
​
            Choreography: George Balanchine, New York City Ballet, 1951
              Music: Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky (excerpts from Swan Lake, Op. 20)
              Scenery and costumes: Cecil Beaton
 
Well, a prince comes out with a feather in his hat, and that’s the plot.
                                                                                                George Balanchine
 
 
basis is the score
     rather than old footwork
            resistance—his version quickens bird hearts; he attends to the flock
           who flap and flap and flap and flap and do not mime
     and do not bow to the cool countenance of the Queen
and do not harden into feathered ornaments
 
 
Tschaikovsky speaks from beyond the grave;
     he is keen on revision: omit this, adjust that, valse bluette,
           a new ending, 400 yards of black tarlatan, backswept
            to find a bird in a little finger or head movement, his creature-like
     demand. Odette, always
unobtainable
 
 
 
 
MONUMENTUM PRO GESUALDO

                             Choreography: George Balanchine, New York City Ballet, 1960
                             Music: Igor Stravinsky (three madrigals by Gesualdo, recomposed for instruments)
                             Scenery: David Hays
 
 
Only a whiff of menace
in the muted horns
Don Carlo’s scandalous
chromatics long buried
but not forgotten—cup
your ear on dissonance
unresolved
 
her weighted figure in the air
 
She walks in circles,
a measured pace, slides
down his back to rest
in the crook of his leg,
gentle, like a lamb
moved to stillness--
 
the mood, arrested in a far off place
 
All women are beckoned
to lean on danger clear-
cut, to brush fingertips
in communion; an eye,
a wave—over
so quickly

Jessica L. Wilkinson is the founding editor of Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry. Her first book, marionette: a biography of miss marion davies was published by Vagabond in 2012 and shortlisted for the 2014 Kenneth Slessor Prize. Her second poetic biography, Suite for Percy Grainger, was published by Vagabond in 2014. In 2014 she received a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship to research her third poetic biography, Music Made Visible: a biography of George Balanchine, which is forthcoming in 2019. In 2016, she co-edited Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter Publishers). She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at RMIT University, Melbourne.

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