If we don't read one another
who do we ever read
and if we don't read one another
who can we expect to read us?
and if we don't read one another
and if we don't read
why bother writing
these lines so deep in our faces
that take so much living
to begin to make a dent
the child's dimple a tiny word
the frown of a young adult
a curse and the sags the scars
by forty a couplet
by fifty or sixty scarce a sonnet
even by ninety and a hundred
the tale told rarely an epic
but always
always worth another look
|
HIGHWIRE
Reminds me of the worst circus I ever saw
the Bigleoni in Saint Louis
with only a couple talents in the show
to spin dishes juggle sway on the trapeze
and dash backstage to change their names and clothes
while the mushmouth ringmaster blathers
and one thin clown squirts us and pops balloons
and my kids hatch some monster bellyaches
on cotton candy peanuts and the like
and start pulling big stage yawns
at which point it's way past time to go
when there's a fanfare and out stumbles
this pudgy little guy
in a red cape and tight tights
and a couple days' growth a whisker
looking a bit irate
like he just woke up with a porcupine
and none too pleased at the thin crowd
as he climbs to the highwire
through a brassy offkey flourish
and who knows what he's thinking
maybe about his shrunken underwear
but the spotlight wobbles up
and steadies and he's on
and the kids stop groaning a minute
as he fires up a motorcycle
that smokes and stutters badly
painted all the same red as his clothes
and I think there's nothing to this
fool running rims on a tightrope
and instead of handlebars
a twenty-five foot balance pole
and I'm tired as he is calling this a show
when he shoves off
and gets halfway out there
and the stuttering little red thing up and dies
and there he is
sixty feet off a cement floor
with a flimsy little net
he could break right through
with all this extra weight
astraddle the problem
in a skintight devil suit
onstage and no getting back
out where it's put up or shut up
at first they try to bluff it through
the band gives him a ragged buildup
and all three spotlights search him out
until we see the sweat begin to pop
as he fiddles with the gas and choke
and finally waves them off
and my palms are itching and burning
my throat bone dry
as he rises on his toes
and swings his weight down
to kickstart it
and it sulks and coughs
and the pole wows like a monster bowtie
and he wobbles and practically dives off
this teeny thing he never gave a damn about
and twice it catches twice it dies
in dead silence
even the peanut vendors still for once
then his face lets go the anger
and gets wondering and round
as he puzzles through it
and on the third try coaxes
it to hang on for a minute
and as he revs and warms it
in no hurry now
he scans us all from way up there
and so help me I can see
the scowl climb back aboard him
and burn the clutch
and ride the twenty feet or so
then slide down the rope exhausted
and stomp off not even bowing
to our feverish applause
|
Paul Hunter
published in the Beloit Poetry Journal
vol. 39, no. 4 (Summer 1989), 2-4.
ARTIST BIO
Paul Hunter has been poet, teacher,
performer, playwright, musician, instrument-maker, artist, editor, publisher,
grassroots arts activist and shade-tree mechanic. For the past eleven years he
has produced fine letterpress books under the imprint of Wood Works—currently
including 22 books and 46 broadsides. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry
Journal, Bloomsbury Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry, Poetry
Northwest, and Raven Chronicles and as well as in three full-length books and
several chapbooks. Recipient of the 1998 Pym Cup and the 1999 Nelson Bentley
Award, he lives and works in Seattle. His full-length collection of farming
poems, Breaking Ground, from Silverfish Review Press, has been reviewed in the
New York Times, the Home News Tribune, the Small Farmer’s Journal, and the Raven
Chronicles, and is a finalist for the 2005 Washington State Book Award. A second
volume of farming poems due next year is entitled Ripening.
