POEM

That the acrobat would remain instead

In the burning hoop rather than complete

Their turn through it is a suspect thought. Why

Halt there in that residual nought wrought,

Assault that seary vortex, flarehenge shroud,

Round and red as Plath’s ovenhead. Ghastly

Silhouettes of gaslight pervade our past;

Kindled images drenched in daguerre, ancient

To the point of banishment when evenings

Vanish in a similar coup, v-neck-deep in

Loinclothed caverns it’s best to hide. Abide

May elapse and they, framed by flames, fall from

That looped height finale, that halo-hold

On all our eye normally denies. Still,

The signal desire to stay locked in such

Arsonous arcs is one the circus rocks

Against each night in its maze of dreams,

Replaying the deaths that dared defy this ploy.

Is this highjinks all our mountebanks allow:

With thrall a ring of fire they marry the day

To their devious acts and thus are at last

Delivered, severed from its whole, that portrait

Momentarily clicked past every portal

Scorching their soles as they halt there bathed

In that eye whose lashes fry their hair and toes

Posing perhaps for the one photo its parade

Maims our streets with, vicious charade whose

Promised feats are purely made, not performed.

One might imagine it were in the nature to occur.

You could conclude this event was more yours

Than nature’s tiger tricks extinct already for

Their blessedness, a mock phrase the lecturer

Faces lions with, his tamed stallion stoned as

They lean over the podium to watch us wince

At each pick ax throe. That cam contaminates

What it captures, bright cages bulge with fetish

Divulgences—it freezes trapezes, these bareback

Riders, nude knees. They cannot move beyond

This figure, they must die there daily just for fun.

Charioted into that charred station, this

Stagey stasis verges on the absurd, what a coal

Crude farce, though objections to imperfection

Are part of the drama enacted by critics:

Obsolete the sole acrobat’s illusive tiptoe

Teeter that flammable cameo concerns us;

How the spotlight is mottled in the star, blotched

By their performance marring each watched face.

Such sight must perpetuate what it sought

Or go astray: but is this status, this

Jumpcaught bit what our linear needs

To thwart its deliberately taut onslaught,

Swan somersault halted strid-air, though no

Continuation of the comedian

In that conflagration could be the true

Disruption, the correct avoidance of

Transcendence: it can’t taunt that denouement

FX-splendiddy enough, unlike the way one’s

Living beyond their years in splatter or

Pattern brings fit end to each leapt theft,

Though certainly one stalls its engulfment with

Curious realms of appalled affrights viz.

An astral body coined in light, the vaunt

Tumbler pauses there in their circ de solar

Auto da fe, feral fireball our drone

Missiles visit hourly to satisfy the spacious

Prey of the ticket window’s demands:

Why do I care if they burn there in mid air

Abandoned by the gruesome need to reach

The applause line, to round the stadium track

Racing for the tape across their chests hurrah

While victor olympian marathonic greeds gild

Post-event. Better calamity for them, they

Should perish publically in clusters of cloud

Clash fare, the bomb heard posthumously by

The body it shatters. They should explode there;

Let them droop like an upside down U from

That white hot hoop. When Hart Crane sailed through

The goalposts to win the game for Sodom High in

Their annual grudgematch against Gomorroh

Prep, he shone for a moment as bright as this,

Each stadium cheering his radium. Fireworks

To our face must fly the phantom bound pyreward

Drenched daily from raucous Pompeii . . . But ask

The acrobat: demand from her/him whether

Hovering in that hell is preferable to

The headlong hurl of time: does it protect

The climax from commencement’s rash intent,

From end and then the only end of end, hails Larkin—

You will have seen the sun as a figure standing

Inside a similar wheel etched enfold, Da

Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Sustained by his

Refusal pall to ever leave this modest pose,

That threshold of gold spits scarring us for

The sacrifice that surely the crowd expects.

Inca-high that knife gleams. History buffs

Confirm his death and worship none but him

Perhaps. Lingering, third-degree, ideal,

Some hung circumference of furnace

Festival. Like celebrant Empedocles

We prefer an oval entry to eternity,

Who saw how perfect circ his volcan rim

Rose in its apotheosis of form, pure

Aureate anti-goal, broken so un-coned

And conjured in its ofference of O.

Say it is this incompleteness excites us.

If it were closed, if the acrobat aced

Her symbiotic roundgame, if the goal

Were capable of twinning its beginning gone,

Would DadaVinci/VineVanGogh have cheated?

Shall we salute, requite, honor, any

Height which resists summit, disdaining each

Ultimate point that might map our madness,

Spurning the pursuit of angels who seek

Peaks only, dullards pining for the crest’s

Honed sharpness of spite, groundsake shed where

We doctrinaire humans find sync thread in

Some secular oriel. Regardless of descent

An actor takes their bow from this window

Lit by licking jets as if its footfire

Spanned the entire stage, or, thinned to a line,

Led tightrope misstep regrets. Circling

Whom is the audience, applauding for

Coherence they griddle the enclosure

With incendiary candles whose torch would

Barbecue them if they dared abandon

That pose their tragic-guarded aspirations

Demand every artist must adopt: don’t

Bail and save yourself, Rimbaud, show-and-

Flambeau, rainbow-scald us till we laugh.

We love to see your turn-as-burnout blazed

Across our bluetube skies, your moon

Rockets die Titanic-wise. Hush-lit

Orchesta pits await but why would she

Not complete her set, traverse that fiery

Core and trudge back safely in center ring;

What need too urgent to gratify our slavish engine

Moults us in that molten omega motif,

Bold bad figure trying to transbolt itself into

Pain’s pantheon of prancing grindshows film

Ilumed, from whom these testy trips descend;

When cymbals cling their triumph there, why

Does artifact elect the Paphos illusion,

Scales wept in random arbors, desiccate

Flowers whose vase unearthed the breach

Of our first kin. Appalled sleep of the sentinal

Culminating in twelve o’clock amendments and

Celebrations—fixated by laminations of

Dexterity: to remain there in that Shadrach

Shade, that Abednego abyss where tapering

Grapes render the host bodied as mould mouth,

Incomplete transubstantation of the ashes

Promised by such. Exposed to this apotheosis

Of the will obeying its stubborn occupation

Of the suicide it opposes, how can we

Respond when there is no red in the blood to

Accent the mime’s whiteness that designates

And underlines this cry for gore: nonlineage

The liontamer opens each cage hoping to

Channel the crossing over of the dice, odds

Gods wrestle as stainedglass, angel porthole

Jacob juggles with and must jettison the privacy

Of, because the act must occur in the show:

The acrobat could stand there on her gymroom

Treadmill encircled by flames in solitude, who’d

Care? Publication’s scandal is vital, to air

One’s immolation’s the de rigeur we pay for—

Thrown wager against that hazard entrance, he,

The exegete costumed in cameo, the clone

Of our circular locket solar island marmoreal,

Posited motionless and visual, this principal

Model fixation focus of interest and poised

Inaction, this cessationpoint where one’s

Lapidary leap suffers its defiant disgrounding

Death around which cancellations flash

And norms occur: in the tethered fire of its

Incompatibility may we see this evanescent

Foreign frontier erasure all ways the farer flies—

A cat would not sit in that hot that long.

Maybe only Bartleby can understand

This arch refusal to honor the task and

Go through the hole that enters the stale turnstile

Of success, to land standing amid acclaims

Less receptive than those flames that clapped us

Rife for the briefest of blinks, captivated

Spellbound, gaining that acme game whose contest

Our feebleness would bear the better of,

Wear its caesura more purely. What suspension

In the poet’s portrayal of silence, rude

Interruption of the spectacle by this perched

Ecstasy of decline, musing the stoopstance

Of routine, elevating its spasm comically

—The tragic transport is empty (Holderlin)—

Barren, contradictory, purgatorial,

Pause unconnected, discontiguous coup,

Bridge-span the bride’s threshold bloodied with

Liminal costumes of grief. Who repudiates

In spite of himself the gulf between this loss

Of trajectory in a space wagered by weight,

A grace of phases borne now by the citizen

Brow, laurel yearning from emerging light to

Observe their whole depleted origin, scald-version

Displacing this usurpation of a course

Reserved for lustral berth. Acro is a stand-in

Syncly for the hearth whose gate waits to

Consume this fence-sitter, unwilling arbiter

Loathe to choose which of their substituted

Phoenix-eyeflicks can span this whirlicue

If only to escape the eternal bracing it takes

That cut-out coin to fix cold within space

A corpus collage, practicing whose personae—

Unanimously deformed, incessantly lazy,

Beyond seen clearly, veils cleaved, as when

Your nape dawns for the headsman’s axe and

He spits to make its split-edge shine sharper

For every arctic-pitted spectator—

Investing the forsaken sky with this

Decisive dearth is not enough to placate

Alleviate our loneliness as probe-missiles

Out-limbing him with love for his ice-cream

Hat and hacked-off head, the holo-guillotine

Honing itself against any lack of descent

From that arcade’s space capsule, or Anne

Sexton painting the shade carbon monoxide

Tints skin with in your car’s career, cherry sword,

Aureoled revolt upon the shocktuft tree:

That she, the acrobat, should fear that sphere

Of fire would seem synonymous with our own

Hesitance, but can that figure sustain its ground

Up there in transient facticity, that

Matchstick myth mourned by all, mute-hymned

To the core. In Summer harvest the hung

Fruits manifest spirit, flesh hangs from an ideal

Wheel flung and clinging to air’s a-leaf womb

Atmosphere toppling at hand. How near

It roams its round of annihilated creation

Emanating from the central outcast spun;

Can the burning child awaken the father

In time to be rescued or will he too grow old

Against vigilance. Or must he watch over

This oval cremation where the wind’s kinks

Wither infancy’s summation, trender toward

Spurious apparitions, godmaze stalled in some

Corrupt word preferred to those I might throw;

Any furtive shadow my launchpad had.