Retired Ballerinas, Central Park West

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti b. 1919 Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Retired ballerinas on winter afternoons

walking their dogs

in Central Park West

(or their cats on leashes—

the cats themselves old highwire artists)

The ballerinas

leap and pirouette

through Columbus Circle

while winos on park benches

(laid back like drunken Goudonovs)

hear the taxis trumpet together

like horsemen of the apocalypse

in the dusk of the gods

It is the final witching hour

when swains are full of swan songs

And all return through the dark dusk

to their bright cells

in glass highrises

or sit down to oval cigarettes and cakes

in the Russian Tea Room

or climb four flights to back rooms

in Westside brownstones

where faded playbill photos

fall peeling from their frames

like last year’s autumn leaves

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Retired Ballerinas, Central Park West” from These Are My Rivers. Copyright © 1981 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, www.wwnorton.com/nd/welcome.htm.

Source: These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1993)

Biography

As poet, playwright, publisher, and activist, Lawrence Ferlinghetti helped to spark the San Francisco literary renaissance of the 1950s and the subsequent “Beat” movement. Like the Beats, Ferlinghetti felt strongly that art should be accessible to all people, not just a handful of highly educated intellectuals. His career has been marked by its constant challenge of the status quo; his poetry engages readers, defies popular . . .

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