Making Up: Circus Clowns

Making Up: Circus Clowns

'Weary Willie' is very real to me. He is a man

who has given up. The boat has gone and left him.

The cards are stacked against him. He's content

to make out with what he's got. He knows

he'll go no further. 

                                                Emmett Kelly
 

I can’t trace it but there must’ve been a day

or a moment or a move that turned us

away and into different lengths

of shadow.  Thin and almost invisible

we both stood in the nearly no light

and moved on our own and if we did happen

to cross paths we were respectful, reverent

even, one worn out war king to the other,

tipping our chins in resolution that it’s all,
everything we'd ever gone through, 

over.  Sad clowns really who at the end

of the show go slowly close and nearly into the mirror

to take off their paint in what's left of the disc

of reflection in the little light of vanity,

the one bulb left still glowing. But it's

flickering and buzzing and stained with

wings of moths and flies.  The tigers have been put down

to their cages, and the lions too, and even they

are too old to pace anymore.  Only the elephant,

ancient and born old, noses out into

the air toward the warm sun.  She’s had

a good run.  None of the balls burst under her

big behind.  We waited while the people watched

and stuffed themselves with nuts and whipped-to-

cloud sugar.  They paid to see great feats.  Every-

one they came to see has been trained

for acute moments: the light on their one act alone. 

The highwire makes their neck ache.  Still,

they gasp at all the right times when the walker

fakes a fall.  They gasp when the bike is

lifted and it’s like Jesus he’s walking on air

and makes it across and makes it

look easy and roars the tent down leaping

like Tarzan from lead to lead  We too, once,

believed in the big acts.  We still rub

our necks for them.  But honestly I haven’t

looked up to the roof in a long, long time.

After the sad clown became sadder (because

we’ve been trained too, haven’t we) (and I’m trying

to remember when that was) when she died

the first time or wanted to, it didn’t

take and you were twelve and still

waited for Christmas though less anxiously.  

When she came back she was changed, sedated,

far away, we began to clean the debris of different

roads, clowns or elephants depending on what job
we were.  We still had our face paint and trunks and wasn’t that

a blessing, and days we’d come out of our closet

looking almost identical and the closest of friends. 

But I saw you once add another color

to your rouge.  If I hadn’t been ready to knock

anyway I wouldn’t have seen.  If your door wasn’t

already almost open and swinging I wouldn’t

have seen: it’s the color of the space between the floor

and the net when the net is removed.  It’s a shimmer

of waves, its vertigo in its rawest but ground down

with a pestle of nerve and it’s the drawing up

of this shimmer with the brush to touch your chin

your cheeks, just above the turn

down of the lips, where it could, if the story

were different, go an opposite way all together.

But it’s written already and has been.  You paint

it on your face and your face changes and you’re re-

solved, and anyway there’s no going back

once the hot light is spot on and you start
to sweat and remember that

you’re meant to distract the crowd

between the extraordinary tragedy of the old tiger limping

out with the lion with a thorn in her paw
and the high wire lady who really,

really is falling this time and it’s all netless (but nobody
told us) and everything, I can read it on your face, I can

feel it in my own, breaks through
our paint: look, we’re still

about the same you and me after all

these years.  We are.  We are still about the same
even after she hits the floor and it's over

and today we don't have to wash it off at the end to know.