Swan Lake

78 the minnesota review Kathleen Geminder Swan Lake 1. Passion: I first knew it as grace, innocent as girls in mauve sashes at a barre formalized as pirouettes and entrechats costumed in blue velvet, silver braid, white tulle. The steady, serious Prince and swan-shy girl danced their formal desire deep within chastity's cool blue wood as if the darkness of the sorcerer's spells were not their darkness as if unfaithfulness were only evil magic as if the nighttime chastity of swans were deadly. A nineteenth-century aesthete's idea of love is a dance pure, taut, above all controlled, a dance made not of bodies but of lines grace tulle velve. The dark mirror/minor side of love breaking only in the music breaking song into anguish of fragments. 2. Seeing Swan Lake as a young girl denatured desire, pouring it into a curved, antique vessel which I clasped to my breast with balletic drama and sipped during porcelain daydreams, Geminder 79 I superimposed blue forests on red Fords and the merest sibilant thought of what I had not done but might have wanted brought uneven pulse to unremembered places and trembled in my knees. Chaste kisses fluttered through those years; lips with no more passion than swansfeathers brushed other lips, cheeks, eyes. These dances of swans and the stiff shuffle of adolescents moving to the rhythmic cough of chaperones left me unprepared for the stealthy guilt of hotels for lurid red velvet rooms for my love coming to me in jockey shorts and bare, hairy legs. Romance is something you look at, think about; but I could neither look nor think as my whole nineteenth-century aesthetic of love swept out of the window into the river that ran by the hotel. 3. The ballet's cyclorama of moonlit wood and clear blue lake stretched taut between dreams of romance and the undreaming loss of virginity. And off stage, moving purposefully, doing errands, in and of the world I still stood questioningly poised to see both pure blue wood and hotel room. That the fabric did not shred and expose the back room world was more shock than the unthinking, unhalting pull of sex. 80 the minnesota review Seeing Swan Lake again, fifteen years later, is to come to naivete's source, drink again of denatured desire, and taste now the bitter undertone of shame. But it is also to know that passion is not a ballet choreographed a century ago, but a dance that springs and bursts through blue forests and white tulle to bloom red and joyful. ...