I. FLIGHT
"Alive, alive, alive inside,
Everything you want to see,
Nothing you would want to be."
The barker shouts by the orange tent
Where we enter the grounds
And we are drawn to wonders wondered at
Since childhood to be held and lost again.
The barns, away across the track and green,
Red since the last century,
Have whole animals with two
Or four legs as required
And one head, but in the Circus Blanc
Rules laid down generations ago
Do not apply. A calf with two legs
Extra protruding from its shoulders
Blats, another calf with two heads answers,
The cat with rabbit's legs hops
In its box, and the white leopard
Rolls it's pink eyes toward them all.
Your pale fingers dig my arm.
The color of flight in here is white.
White crows circle inside small cages,
White swallows wheel in right arcs,
White bats hangs all day
Into dusk until white moths flutter
To the neon lights. The Rubber Girl
Is frail, twists around in her cabinet
Like a lime ran in a ban,
The three-eyed man, who sells his picture
To make a living, cannot focus his forehead eye,
Which has no lens or pupil and his others are weak
So he moves close to ask
And we move out and on.
You stutter it's better to see such things when young
And laugh at your giddy inability to speak.
II. GRANGE
Out from under a sky colored like one of his skirts
On which my mother'd pit too much bluing,
My father would sit dressed just so
In the grange building and describe displays
Of miniature towns, miniature farms
Suggesting units and hope on a small scale,
The railway riding against the wall
Somehow still pulling it's thread,
To the present decline and overproduction,
Which I escaped but miss.
His thick hands would wave over
Permanently green fields of oats
Running to the black velvet backdrop, a horizon
I would stand so small before
And feel his distance.
He spoke of diversity, parity
And found his chances narrow
Like the sun-filled door.
III. PLANT ZOO
We stand with several women trying to make out
The brevier of the premium list
Before entering the produce sheds.
We're struck first by the rows of apples,
Twenty-six varieties of commercial or home grown,
McIntosh, Wealthy, Beacon, Snow,
Lawes, Wolf River, Pound Sweet,
Russet, Sheepnose, Rhode Island Green,
Northern Spy, Twenty Ounce, Liberty,
Jonathan, Cortland, Quinte,
A list including those that remind me
Of Faberge-Alexander, Duchess, Tetofsky,
Yellow Transparent, brought as rootsticks
From czarist Russia to ripen early
Before the early frosts and snows we have in common.
Polished greens, yellows, browns, reds,
Each a graft or sport because no native
Is satisfactory, not one of them allowed to fall
From the tree or to this foot-worn floor.
My grandfather's orchard is gone now
But I can still feel the wax and tar of his chores.
All the other flowers, cakes, garden stuff
Surround us, even the vegetable freaks :
Vegetable hands, feet, birds,
Or unrecognizable beasts rising above us
On the tiered shelves, strange bestiary
As of lost aristocracy.
IV. FLORAL HALL
When little, I walked up the unpainted stairs
In a wing of Floral Hall,
A hall in which there were no flowers,
Only Stainless Steel anfbblack rubber
Of DeLaval, paper caps and wood displays
Of Modern Forester, galvanized pans
And cast iron arches for sugarmakers,
Local plumbing, wiring, and furnace concerns,
Men from the Blue Seal Feeds Mill
Whose boxcars we watched all year
Make the grade by the unloading dock.
Each of these booths and displays
In a separate bay of the building
Built like a great round barn.
Over these men my father knew
I walked under the hot metal knee roof,
By the single copper pipe continuously running
Water into the long sink urinal
That I found I couldn't reach.
A man I did not like held me
And, angry, set me down
When I could not go.
I laid my dime in a calloused hand
And fled the high room of talk
Then clattered on like a woodpecker on tin.
It was a code I felt I could not break.
V. CANDLE MAGIC
On the midway a man is doing a magic act
With candles, they appear and disappear,
Lit and unlit.
A slight of hand,
A flight of fancy.
We pretend to understand,
Then are flustered with no pretense at all.
The hand moves one way, the eye the other.
The colors of the flames and wax
Are those of leaves descending
On the tents and grounds.
VI. FIRST OF THE CENTURY
The whoa what of the helicopter
Offering exhibition rides draws my attention.
The canvas it flies over suggests
Pictures of the polished cotton stretched
On a sprucewood frame of the American Flyer
That in 1908 or 09,
When the definition of barnstorming changed, carried my grandmother and one Wright brother
Into the air into a rare cloud
And words like *wonder, Elijah, John, death,
We're murmured, and both returned
And tool their turns responding
To questions of desperate joy.
The brothers did not yet understand
That their one great accomplishment,
Controlling pitch and yaw and roll,
Had already been surpassed,
The open-ended dream closing for them.
My grandmother explained years later how her dreams of falling altered, not now from beams, trees, cliffs, but from stiff whistling wings,
A handsome man's hands grasping after her,
Falling into the arms and upturned palms
Of acquaintances who couldn't hold her up.
VII. THE AQUARIST
We watch the children through the glass,
The gape of their mouths in first surprise
Then imitation of the fish
That the warden has in tanks
To demonstrate size and legal species.
With his underslung jaw he seems brother-German to the pike, his most voracious specimen. He speaks of vomerine teeth,
Intricacies of native, native transient,
Transplanted, and spawners.
His seemingly lidless eyes don't move.
We joke and stop joking
At the idea of divaricating species
That led to fish, to him, to the children.
The air outside is charged and dry.
VIII. LEAP
I once watched a man signal theone and only
Steel Pier Driving Horse and girl
To leap from the special built 40-foot tower
Into the Volunteer Firemen's tank.
The horse was white and dappled
Like my grandfather's, but the girl
Was like nothing I had seen.
In yellow bikini and diving cap
She leaned heavily on the horse's neck
Working him down the pitched ramp
Till his feet stopped rattling the boards
And they carved an arc that divided
And she fell free, a whirling edge
That whittled my attention to a fine point.
They disappeared in the water crater
Their bodies made, then reappeared
Head by head in the waves.
For months I thought of her glory,
Who, falling, could see her halo glory
On the magnesium blue water.
IX. TIRED SEX
Girls by well-lit tents are dancing
As come-ons for men-only shows.
One swings beads between her legs,
Another has tassels whirling on her breasts.
Men sidle, strut, or simply walk through the door. Once called inside the women will
Hardly dress again, crowds already sold.
On stage a quick disrobing
Bump and grind, then the line
For free lunch. Every girl knows
To hold the ears to pull back hard,
Piss, or pinch if the man should bite
Her almost smallest organ.
Sometimes they accommodate a drunk
Who comes onstage and wants to rut.
You ask about my first time there
And I say it wasn't the thrill it was,
A lie about nakedness and smell
That moves us closer and apart.
X. CAVALCADE
Before the evening light makes all lights necessary, mercury and venue wheeling down behind the hills, the cavalcade unfolds. Horses, cows, sheeps, goats,
Winners in each class plus handlers
Parade around the track.
Crowds behind snow fence barriers wave,
The local band in the bandstand plays
And everything seems possible.
I would like to say these marchers are planets
Moving in the precise elliptical orbits.
Of a system broncos in some storm past.
They move in paths that will collide or miss
But here for once, at day's end,
Pattern obtains.
XI. LIGHTS OUT
After days of irreproachable weather
This last night is fouled by lightning,
Storms occult the stars,
Flashes shut the electrical system dowm
And for a time everything is back.
Then flashlights in the hot dog stands,
Headlights in the parking lot,
And there the man with candles
In his hands and pockets.
Above everything we can smell autumn.
We are thoroughly earth bound,
My bladder full, your alkaline skin
All my fingertips,
Both of us shaken to run in this comedy
Of odd surrounding poorly lit,
But glittering.