VERA-ELLEN
In CinemaScope, VistaVision, glorious
Technicolor, and Stereophonic Sound,
on television and in classic movie houses,
Vera-Ellen, you dance, and I fall in love.
You were an artist in the perfect sense.
It’s not your face or figure I admire most,
but what you refused to let on. Your thin
frame longed to be three sizes larger, but
you starved yourself so it seemed a miracle
when you leapt, landed, and never broke
a bone. It’s never right being born one way
with a constant wish to be another. Even
though Kelly and Astaire stood sideline
to watch you work, if you were here today
and I asked if things had gone exactly right,
if every dance and pose had been flawless,
I hope you’d have the nerve to admit they
hadn’t. Forget showbiz demand—it may
have been a factor, but hardly the only
reason you pushed yourself so far. Nearly
killing yourself wasn’t a matter of vanity.
Your body was half the art. But as you aged,
you looked much older—a side effect of self-
starvation. So the studio covered your neck
for nearly every scene in White Christmas
to hide the creased skin that gave the game
away. Your smile grew grotesque by what
it hid. Vera-Ellen, you died small, withered,
adrift in a sea of lost ambition, and an ideal
worth self-sacrifice now seems oddly out
of place. It’s the same way I see your films—
belonging to that bygone era, where faces
and homes are lively colored like circus tents;
balanced with such a naïve sincerity on that
Hollywood ledge between fantasy and futility.
Unpublished Poem
Spring 2005
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