Poetry
Circus of Stares
by Walter Bargen
What slipped past without a yes or no,
without the italicized moment of memory?
Too much the nodding of nodding heads.
I entered a theater, more a falling into a chair
and a fascination with falling, fait accompli,
tragedy known by the obvious.
The actors acted out their real lives acting
in the movie, Freaks, 1932. Lives turned too far
in a direction we didn't dare to look
if we passed them on the street: twisted,
too short, too tall, old too quickly, hair
in the wrong places, missing this and that,
both and more, half there and less, Siamese
and hermaphroditic. A story of love:
rich dwarf and the Cleopatra of the trapeze,
the jilted, the poisoning, the stormy night
of revenge, the audience not remembering
a single plot twist, only the impossibilities:
Human Skeleton and Bearded Lady living
happily ever after with their fully haired baby.
Calamity almost too small to be noticed by anyone
but the actors craving applause from the circus
of stares. In the final frame, the once beautiful
Cleopatra squawks, a disfigured, half-feathered,
human-headed chicken. She looks up, waiting
for us to lean over the edge of her cage.
I step out of the theater and drown
in the light of the sidewalk.
Today the dialogue is beyond words,
the setting unexpected, set around pasture
ponds and small lakes, the honing strap
of cattail blades sharpened on a breeze,
grass catching bracelets of summer fog.
The actors bellicose frogs waving
useless appendages, doubled torsos
as if grafted to mirrors, too many legs projecting
from backs and sides, as if one amphibian
were crawling out of another out of another,
a fearful plot issuing from the submerged
theaters of the world.