The sylph, After Midnight

The just-dead dancer slips from her fresh coffin, a white skeleton already, but every inch a pavé of sequins and of fragments of pearl (mother of).  She makes the most of her suddenly bony physique, twirling, collapsing, picking herself up again, then en pointe on moonlit, glistening toe joints, her proud skull held high by invisible tendons and muscles of graveyard air, close with the scent of fresh-turned clay.  And as the strains of Ellington from a distant band shell fade from lively faintness to naught, she slips back, with the relieving sigh of hinges, from all earthly sight.