Circus
I. Language
How the squirrel, skittish, leaps, lobbing its orange
fire through the green
maples. For us, so much
of the risk, so much of the safety
lies in the tiny hooks and branches
of that easy, though sometimes
reckless name.
II. Service
During the war, Andrew Asthalter, a Wimbledon
champion, said the crossing searchlights
against the horizon
made the sky look like the moving X-Ray
of a hand “reaching up for something,”
he said, “not the bombs,” he said,
but the darkness balking within the darkness,
a thing of flesh you could
almost grasp.
III. Embrace
“I have gone about among you proclaiming
the kingdom, but now I know that none
of you will see my face again, that wolves
will come. Finished speaking, he knelt down with
them all, as they folded Paul into their arms.”
Acts 20: 25-36
IV. Arena
We watched the ball grow, rolling across
the spring grass, and we all touched it, and its
spongy color pushed back, as it continued
to grow, then slowly crushed us, until we knew
it like the blood inside the walls of our body.
