I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven across the plains' enormous spaces around you. I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for you to bear where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed and the open valise speaks of flight but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem as the underground train loses momentum and before running up the stairs toward a new kind of love your life has never allowed. I know you are reading this poem by the light of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide while you wait for the newscast from the intifada. I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers. I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out, count themselves out, at too early an age. I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious. I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand because life is short and you too are thirsty. I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are. I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse. I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

This is a story of three people set in a seperate world that contains my whole world.

First we have the ringmaster, the tamer of beasts, at whose command even tigers crawl through fire, jump through hoops or sit on a stool and drool like a dog.

This is his universe and he knows how to control it: starvation is his secret tool. And for all those who care to listen he says,

"Never trust the world. Look at me, say if for a moment I let my gaurd down, go over and pat that tiger on it's head, I will be soon in it's stomach"

Maybe because he knows that we, men too are animals, pretty dangerous ones. Let's now not argue about this question of evolution, you might say "We don't have tails anymore and we even cover our privates. We have refined rules of etiqutte such as how to hold the knife and the fork, as if our unique opposable thumbs are't good enough!"

Besides none argues with the ringmaster, it's like in the Army where one doesn't argue with the drill seargent. Besides who knows one might wake up and find a tiger in the bed.

The ringmaster married (his wife sits in a cage called Home) and in time to him a daugther was born. What must have he felt? Pride of a male tiger? Wonder at that simple perfection, a perfection he dreams of achieving by that perfect taming of her?

....................................

The knives now begin to cut her hand, she withdraws her hand and winces in pain. It's all blood, her dress is soaked in blood. Whose fault is it? the knives? the knife thrower's for sharpening his grief to such a high edge?

He sees her climbing higher and higher, away from his deadly knives, the ladder sways and she keeps climbing into the sky and before he can cut the ladder into pieces she explodes high and becomes a star.

So when you see a knife thrower throwing his knives at the stars and see the knifes arc back to the ground tiny glints of starlight on their bodies, understand how hard he is trying to reach that one star in the sky,

that ringmaster's daugther.

The seed for this poem came after hearing Stephen Dobyns, a poet in residence at Tech, read a poem today at a poetry reading. The poem was about an orangutan shitting on the opera stage. This is a ploy or a staged trick, staged by the management, to somehow capture the attention of the kids(who would have been forcibly dragged to the opera ofcourse) as they would be the future audience. The fake orangutan led to the idea of a circus and then these characters centered around a circus started to take shape in my head: a ringmaster, his daugther who is a flying trapeze artist and an outsider: the knife thrower. And that is what this (incomplete) fable is about.

2/7 00:30 atl

In the presence of silence (it gleams like a spider's filament) I doll up the words:

honk(a child's teddy bear that say's "Push here" or two geese talking as they fly to the lake)

the horn(of plentitude, pure myth or an unicorn, a horse disfugured)

of the fire truck's(all traffic stops, it passses gleaming red, obsessively polished by hands to remove even the shadow of ash)

Let it wail(only in the distance, only in my sleep when you surface) and never arrive in time,

as the light today burns silence to the ground!