Tuesday Poem: previously published by Feminist Studies in 1999, and in The Paterson Literary Review in 2005

 

The Circus Comes To Paterson

Once they set up Clyde Beatty’s Big Top

at the foot of Sandy Hill, in the empty lot

where projects used to rise in long barracks rows,

housing the soldiers and their wives after the war,

and then struggling families like mine,

until they finally knocked them down,

flattened them like furrows

ploughed up for just a few seasons

to give us all a chance to sow a future.

And there it was: our future,

in a house, with an alleyway and a garden,

on Summer Street, ripeness setting in, I guess,

because when the circus came

our parents were giddy too,

as we joined the crowd in the bleachers,

sitting in the backs of flat beds,

and pulled in a circle

like a wagon train at chow time.

And we were just like pioneers sitting there,

doing something we’d never done,

a circus right in our living room,

that’s what it felt like

until the elephants came out

and no more than five minutes into the act

one of them broke ranks,

dragging the trainer with her,

the poor guy dangling like an earring

from the hook he held to the side of her head.

That elephant’s berserk!, someone screamed,

and we screamed too when she charged at the trucks,

as people fled up the seats and dropped off the back.

We were paralyzed, which turned out to be all right

because she wasn’t interested in us at all,

she was more intent on the freedom she saw

through an opening in the canvas

and was gone before we had that figured out.

The rest is hearsay.

Stories about her lurking behind the drugstore,

so that Doc nearly had a heart attack,

when he went to see why his dog 
was barking so loud, of how 
she wedged herself between 
the shoemaker’s house and garage,

bending the aluminum siding, 
as she eased back out, how she reared up 
and stamped a footprint in the sidewalk,

before turning tail and running past our house,

so Ralph next door thought he was 
going crazy, when he looked up 
from the paper, and she flew by 
like a bat out of hell.

They caught her way up high on the hill,

locked her in the back of a tractor trailer,

but the circus that day was done for,

there was no going back.

They worked her too hard, 

my mother said to my Dad.

This is what happens .

Meanwhile I stroked the garage’s new curved edges

where her anger had made its mark,

watching the girls take turns

stamping the sidewalk as hard as they could

inside the ring of her footprint.   

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published by Caprice in 1996

When My Mother Finally Met Frankie
for Donna
It was late in his career
so she didn't swoon
like the bobby-soxer
she used to be,

she started singing
Mack The Knife
to him instead,

I don't know why.
It never worked
when she tried it with my father.

She must have been thinking
about Frankie's swagger just then,
how he transformed himself
from a skinny Hoboken kid
into a giant, a shark in a white shirt.

She'd watched him grow 
bigger when he sang,
become a dreamboat,
an ark you could board,
and be rescued in,
from the wrath of God.

She probably wanted him 
to know he had inspired her
that come Hell or high 
water, she was a fighter.

Forget the Dean Martin
husband, the rat pack
bunch of ungrateful kids,
the years of working
night shifts, bouts of
spending like a sailor.

For what?
Once you go under the knife,
once you shed scarlet billows,
it all drops away. Tumor schmoomer.
She, like Macky, was back in town.

But Old Blue Eyes didn't get it.
He smiled, and turned to his bodyguards,
said through his pearly whites:
Get this crazy broad out of my way.