Listening to Astral Weeks & Emailing Russell Thorburn

& Van Morrison is wailing about the fragile dancer
& telling her
to spread her ballerina wings
for if she doesn’t, the wind, the wild air,
will simply whisk her away
where she will then become glued, like seal wax,
to the rippling olive-tinted water
wiggling just behind a factory where they bake soap
& sell it to hotel chains outside the city,
& so she’d be stolen down stream and written
into another’s love song, the ballerina.
& the strings on Ballerina tell us just a bit about a song,
especially that it is an unfixed shape, a dancer
on a trapeze wire & the I withdraws into beauty,
it has to surrender to it
because the trace of the shape of the ballerina
is liminal, it’s barely there,
& it’s so transient that it could fall into another’s
pocket, into another’s love ballades poem,

& so Morrison, right there in the studio, grabs it,
the song & not the ballerina
because she’s already gone, is just a trace
of herself as Levinas would say – she’s emanation –
& she’s just a little eyelash hair on my paper,
& so I email Russ just to tell him
I’ve found it right here, the eyelash, the emanation,
& I put it on this poem, for him.

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist from the Detroit area. He is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, best of the net nominee, winner of the Liakoura Prize and the author of nine poetry collections. His new book, The Light Most Glad of All, was published in 2023 by Kelsay Press. It was reviewed by Tipton Poetry Journal and Trampoline Magazine. Other collections include: Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance (Kelsay Books: 2022) and Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020). He has work in Crab Creek Review, Concho River Review, San Pedro River Review, Panapoly, Sheila-Na-Gig, and The MacGuffin.