I’D GROWN UP with opposition of a different sort to dancing, from a different source: my mother. (Recalling her now, tall, full-bosomed, with the thick brows and full lips of my daughters, I realized that in a few weeks I’d be replaying arguments with a parent younger than I.)

She’d refused me dance classes when I was small; later, had turned a deaf ear to my happy accounts of spending the evening waltzing my feet off in a Round Rock dance hall. If it’s the arts you want, she’d said more than once—pained, disappointed, her mind obsessed with the welfare of the world—there are other fields. A book has a text to show for itself, a play a script, a movie a film, a painting a canvas. But dance? She shook her head, not comprehending. What wasted motion.

Her attitude was not uncommon: Once danced the dance is gone. The dancer turns, the swan dies and it is over. The houselights rise, the audience leaves and the moment is forever lost. But this is the spectator’s view. I knew even at seventeen that for the dying ballerina, making one last time the grand moves of a lifetime (seen by the watching nurse and kin as a few distracted departing twitches), all was still present in bone and sinew.

Knew that for the dancer, the dance once danced remains as long as breath.