Ballet Lesson
A blue plastic bag twirls up to lift
and float on an updraft that began
with a flap of pigeonwing
somewhere on the outskirts of Xi’an,
an updraft that built slowly and then, in a seemingly organic fashion,
raced out over the Pacific,
its final destination
not yet specific
and anyway unknowable
to itself, it simply being a gasp of the heavens
and therefore completely unable
to sustain in its inexorable quest even
the illusion of agency toward something
either exciting or banal
as it now heads south to blow over the ocean funnelling
its way through the famous and Panamanian canal.
How one section of the wideness of our sky
can be considered separately from
any other I don’t know, but as this breeze carries over the Caribbean Isles
it will not create any sort of storm,
will in no way accumulate to wipe out the homes
and small businesses,
the dreams and things bought on loan,
the very existences
of an entire island’s inhabitants, but instead come here,
high outside my fifth-floor window, where it crumples and flexes
this blue plastic bag, pushing it through the air
into a twisting motion which is as expressive
as a ballerina
executing a perfect fouetté
as I sit and watch, concertinaed
into my settee,
the ballerina’s arms stretching out, the ground
below them spinning on the pointe of their toes,
their other leg kicking them round
and around and around three more times in a row.
Jack Houston is Hackney Library’s poet in residence and hosts their online Lockdown Poetry Workshop. His work has appeared in a few anthologies, and in Blackbox Manifold, The Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Poetry London and Stand. (email jack.houston@hackney.gov.uk to join/receive his poetry-packed ‘Lockdown’ emails until the libraries re-open).
