Kate McNamara – Nijinsky

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Five November-December 2024

Nijinsky, poem by Kate McNamara.

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Nijinsky

I am Nijinsky
I am the one who dies when he is not loved.
I dance as the ice carves my bones out of light,
Black hearted, I am implacable,
My blood aches to dance.

I am only a shrine in which the Universe dances.
I thought I was alive, they said I was insane.
I am the dancer in the heart, I have no peace.
Peace, will it ever come?
Ease, the flow of muscle, tissue bone,
O and end, an end to love and mourning.
Death dances me.
I have been mad and yet I understand the truth
And in that I stand alone: pure, beautiful, incorruptible.
I burn and yet I can still dance.
To me the earth is one single state:
It is a God, the fire in the head, in the heart.
My pulse is like an earthquake, I dance the stars
My body is the wind.

I know an infinite range of intricate torment
I will not scream, I will not scream.
I am Nijinsky.
Tell me then if I am not mad?
I cannot dance this pain.
I yearn for the dance of trees
The wind calling me into the grove
So much light, so green so light.

I live in a great darkness.

Mankind makes merry
And God mourns, he is in agony.
I have nothing and I want nothing.
They say I am a magician.
I am not; I am a God in a body
I cannot dance this pain,
It is a song that will not sing
I cannot give it voice, color, movement.

I am Nijinsky.
I am the one who dies when he is not loved.
I am love, I am mad, I dance,
I am ice, once I was fire,
I am not calm, I am a storm.
I am an artist who loves all shapes,
All are beauty. Beauty is harmony, the breath of a God.
I like hunchbacks, I like freaks. I am one.

I can dance like a hunchback
Feel the twisted muscle
The throb of the hump.
The beast clawing to regain me.
I am a creature of hunted nights,
A hawk in a cage.
A creature in a forgotten zoo.

People stare at me and cry
They do not know that even in these cages
I am feeling beauty I cannot be silent.
I will speak
And when I speak
They will deny me.
They will put me in an asylum.
Butterflies,
I will speak with the insane,
I will dance them
They will know me.

I am Nijinsky.
I am God’s problem,
I am his fool.

Foot note – Vaslav Nijinsky was described as the
greatest dancer of his age. He disrupted all the
conventions of his art, changing The Ballet Russe
forever. Not long before the suicide of my eldest
son, Eamon, I was reading yet another biography
of Nijinsky’s life: his demented journals, his
concomitant genius and madness. He was an
elemental force, almost a force outside of nature
and as little subject to social control itself, his was
an absolute insurrection against constraint. This
performance piece I wrote became my funeral o
ration for a son who never came to fruition, who
was as breath takingly brilliant as he was difficult.
Eamon and Nijinsky: spirit brothers.