bookstore ballerina

body tucked tight
pointed like a sign
as if to plunge,
she was all
sudden descent,
elbows in
to minimize
the splash,
as if she could
concern herself with how
the surface of fluid
behaves when she is
under, every
movement there
ripples in
waves of people, bobbing
like buoys on a linoleum
sea of purchases. she
could not disappear,
not there, but described
to, hinted of, a pole to them,
and hoped their christian training
would suspend their disbelief,
press something soft and warm
against something cold and stiff 
and prone, blow
life into form, trust in
what she could be,
make them, if they should see,
which most did not,
the role she knew,
it's lines memorized until
it became a virtuosic flurry of
there-is-nothing-here-for-you-to-see,
look away my darlings,
she did not say, with
a casual wave of pale wrist
look away from me,
i am no mirror for you
and i am not here,
unless i need to be,
but smiling of course,
and pretty, she will
nod, and display teeth
for them who blink,
and they may demand
her breath and gaze,
though their wallets
balloon and their eyes
are a troubled sky
that refuses to let
light shine-
let me show you, he says,
you, he says, here
like this, and she
pantomines for him, like that.

a skin stuffed with barely silent swifts,
she flutters her limbs, like a bag of quick
while he strokes his mustache in the warm
globe of precious sunday light.
as if measuring the leap it would take.

if she wasn't such a clown,
and a good one too,
they would have found
out by now. but he knows,
little by little, he knows...