Standing En Pointe Poem by gershon hepner

Lusting after sensuous lips,
landing on soft shoulders
as welcoming as heaving hips,
I become much bolder
when I perceive the gap between
two pouting breasts, and slide
my hand where dairy of the queen
is cream the thighs can’t hide.
Performing a balletic dance,
I quickly stand en pointe,
quite confident that my romance
will never disappoint,
because I follow all the tips
perceptive from pouting
of breasts more sensuous than lips,
and thighs whose un-dry grouting
confirms that I need no RS
VP to enter where,
as soon as we can both undress,
we’ll find much more to share.

Inspired by Adam Volynsky’s description of Pavlova, described by Toni Bentley’s review of his book “Ballet’s Magic Kingdom: Selected Writings of Dance in Russia,1911–25” (“Appraising Grace, ” NYT Book Review, January 25,2009) . I wrote the first half of the poem at the Getty Museum, immediately before going to see an exhibition of the Limbourg brothers’ “Les Belles Heures of the Duke of Berry.” By an amazing coincidence, immediately after writing lines 6–7 I saw a folio of the Limbourg brothers” “Les Belles Heures of the Duke of Berry, ” illustrating the horror of St. Paul, the hermit colleague of St. Anthony, when observing a Christian in Rome being seduced by a voluptuous lady who was sliding her hand up his thigh. In the Limbourg image, it is the woman who is seducing the man in a manner comparable to the way the man seduces the woman in my poem, and there is a saint on the background, observing what happens with disapproval. My poem has no saintly observers. Toni Bentley writes:

This is a fantastic book. We find out not only about the vicissitudes of Pavlova’s alimentary canal but also about the skeletal structure of her knees, the size of her arch, the height of her jumps, her “sensuous” lower lip and the slope of her “ravishing” shoulders. All this and a clear explanation of the layers of her ample soul. What more could one want to know about the ballerina, long dead, whose name evokes, more than any other, the art she practiced — the art that plumbs the depths of the physical to reach, on occasion, the mystical? “Ballet’s Magic Kingdom” is the first English-language edition of the dance writings of Akim Volynsky, one of the greatest writers on ballet (don’t worry, nobody has heard of him) in the whole 350 or so years of the art form’s relatively brief history… Volynsky, perversely and rather irresponsibly, does not refer to Louis XIV, whose Académie Royale de Danse (founded in 1661,45 years after Shakespeare’s death) codified the classical ballet language — pas de basque, jeté, glissade, piqué, cabriole, fondu, rond de jambe, gargouillade. He prefers to trace the art back to classical Greece and believes, as Rabinowitz wrote in The Russian Review in 1991, that “balletic dance alone preserved the character of the Hellenic sense of plastic art.” Volynsky finds in it the fruition of the philosophies of Kant, Spinoza and Nie¬tzsche. This guy is not confusing tutus with froufrou.


1/25/09