Tricks

 Tricks
   and other non-germane
   prestidigatory legerdemain

I am a clown.
I am a fool.

But I can juggle elephants.

Someday

What I cannot bring myself to say
   I think so loudly to myself.
Someday I will speak
   not soft enough
   nor loud enough,
But spoken once
   the words will
   quiet down and settle in.

Someday.

Sonnet #2

Though often I reflect upon my state
My state reflects less often truth like this
I see today so brilliantly displayed.
Here, truth lies breathless in the scented leaves.

The color slowly changes in a leaf
Which, in that month when breezes make leaves drop
And men at last see glory and believe,
Then shakes until by falling shaking stops.

And so, I also slowly understand,
So stand here shaking while the color comes.
The season of the Lord God is at hand
And season to a Truer Breath succumbs.

Now with the secret glory understood
Then this annointment of the leaves is good.

Sonnet #1

The bird is black against the reddened sky
And hangs there, nearer than the just lost light,
Then fast wings home before the red does die
Accustomed to a less empurpled flight.

Thus light takes depth away when it's undone.
Bright color, for an outline, fades like dust.
The evening star, like hope, follows the sun.
And colder stars in darkness yield mistrust.

But darker still the stillness that I feel
Now that my thoughts to darkness have returned.
Though colorless, the world is just as real
When subtle colors cannot be discerned.

This my day became when light was gone
And darkness' colder furnishing put on.

The Fairgrounds

Early the motors cry sound of their smoke
Already hot from the heat felt at noon,
By children whose passions the summer evokes
And carnival workers beginning their day.

The children amused by the lights and machines
Will suffer the heat and the dryness of tongue.
Their parents will visit and survey the scene
Amused by the children they think they still are.

As I walk among them I'm not even there.
Their eyes do not see my face painted clown white
Or the stars in my eyes that make them disappear
While the air is so wet it would cry if it could.

And then I sit down at the edge of the crowd
Rubbing the denim in brown August dust.
I feel my heart hardly pushing my blood
It hangs there so heavy I tear at the eye.

Some faces appear that before were distracted.
With cautious concern they examine my clothes
As if that had caused me to feel so dejected
And not that you asked me to leave you alone.

Nearby a man with disdainful expression
Waters his grass with his hose in his hand
And his contribution is somehow to lessen
The burden that people have put on his back.

St. Louis County Public Library

I walked into the building
built three years after I was
and found it hadn't changed
from the place of clean smells
The yellowing paper and book glue

Only perhaps sunken into the marshy
Land they built it on.
But no, I know I grew
And it stayed level
because I saw a boy walk up to me
when we mixed our strides
Both pulled from different thoughts

And something mixed besides
As I stopped to let him
run around me

I watched him stumble-run
into an alcove and kneel upon a chair
to watch the glass
Behind the glass were fishes
They floated through the water
Like a bird does in the air
Or a man does when he's free
Or thinks he is

I watched him stare and
We lost track of
Where and who he was
I know he only saw the fishes
Swimming noiselessly through water
Making bubbles

And I know I felt appropriately warm
As in some Winter when
I came inside this building
Stumble-tracking snow
And stared into a glass in
Front of fishes

As incandescent yellow lights burn
And I could only see a boy
And he can only watch a box of water
He dreamed himself inside and I in him.