Nijinsky's Feet
Forget Nijinsky’s feet,
Achilles’ armor, Rembrandt’s
white paling, Goya’s blacks
sublime, potatoes’ profundity,
stones’ profligacy, phonetics
of birdcalls and so on, and so on.
Never mind truth or accuracy,
as if a latter day sooth sayer.
Existence the only irrefutable truth,
and even it may well be a tautology.
We and the world are distinct entities,
with the world, most often over there
someplace, perennially unfolding
like us, wishes to the contrary,
without beginning, without end,
always without end and so on, and so on,
until unless bored or breathless we expire,
notwithstanding Nijinsky’s feet and so on.
Ken Smith
1 comment:
Regarding feet--
My mother was a ballet dancer in her youth. A short tendon connecting her heel to her calf seems to have made it easy to stay on the ball of her foot, or even her toes, and the feet seem to have remembered the steps of a dance much as fingers remember how to knit.
However, the practical consequence of these automatic behaviors was then when she was simply walking on the street, she was particularly prone to falls and an endless series of broken bones.
I used to blame her high heels, which she obviously wore because the alignment of the foot they promote felt more comfortable to her. But, eventually I realized that it was a combination of foot construction and not looking where she was going which produced the falls.
The realization that one of my sons has similar feet, which result in his walking "on his toes" and, as a kid, taking lots of spills has led me to blame the genes.
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