From a Diary of the Plague Year (9)

A circus of emotions these days.
Under the big top, round and round
the cranium the white horse goes,
his acrobatic rider showing sinews.

The value of worry, like the stock
market, has plummeted. I feel
like a hobo who jumped off a train
of events and watched it

go by and away. Now
what, I thought. Not a question.


hans ostrom 2020

A Circus in Germany

A small Roma circus drags Evolution
to Bretzenheim, tacks up posters,
circles battered vans and trailers,
lets animals and children out to stretch.

A llama and two camels with flaccid humps
stand beneath a canopy, munching nothing,
about them the air of wisdom and dung.

A child rides a hippopotamus onto grass.
She looks like a wart on a planet.
The hippo becomes a gray boulder
upholstered in leather. Its teeth are
as big as my fist, its legs as long
as my fingers. How many million
years ago was it a slender fish?

Villagers cut through the park
to peer at the bestiary. a stinking
goat, smirking camels, and stunted
ponies. Children under the tiny
plastic Big Top can be heard
to scream with glee. In there
creatures and people jump through hoops.

hans ostrom
1981/20019

It's 1954 and Emmett Kelly remembers

the Hartford, Connecticut, circus fire,
1944: the big tent went up,

and people panicked like animals,
but the big cats got strangely calm.

The famous clown rushed from
the small dressing-tent in makeup,

managed more authority than a cop
because a clown's not supposed

to speak, so when he spoke,
the wild eyed customers listened.

They let him save their lives
with a frown.  Back in his tent,

he said to Willie in the mirror,
"No show tonight. No show

in Clown Alley."  Other clowns
entered, hysterical, said who'd lived,

who hadn't. (168 hadn't.)
"You were wonderful," they told Emmett,

who had removed half of Willie's face.
As Kelly he shrugged. "I did what I could."

Now in 1954, Madison Square Garden,
Emmett's put on half of Willie's face.

He feels weary.  He tells an interviewer,
"Clowning is nothing you can study for."



hans ostrom 2017