BURNEY
CIRCUS
All the trucks and two monkeys
are rolling - the Maytime and the
frolic together arrive. The Burney
Circus brothers and girls I see
survive one other year. I still
remember old times, when their
Alabama plates read 'Heart of
Dixie'. Now, instead, a couple
with cigarettes, out on the gravel,
are making out already with a
passion like there's no tomorrow.
Two Nissan doors hang open near
the Chevy truck. Big-top center tent,
three-ring circus babe, open up!
-
A few more animals disgorge from
out the padded truck - I watch a
horse bend its swaggered neck in
some sort of horse-relief, while, near
the swallows in the ancient tree singing,
three elephants are somehow led on,
what seems, a string. They bop along
their parking lot like hipsters on parade.
The Burney Circus entrance booth goes up.
-
The staggering carpenters with their
hammers and their tools at work - 'I
never even thought about it,' he says,
one to the other, 'I went to school for
nothing, and the tits, and then I quit.
Now, fuck it all, this life is good.
-
'Three barns on a hundred acres;
never did find the house. Who's
gonna buy it? That farmland's worth
about thirty-five dollars an acre now -
shit they've ruined the countryside.'
He looks up, to put more something
in his mouth. A girl comes over, 'Johnny,
all you ever talk is dirt and bullshit.
Now just shut up.'
-
Nobody does what I do; I do it
twice and I do it new. In isolation
one becomes a God, it is said -
these men in turn become their
Gods of vice and glory! Such a dandy
place, each small-time gravel field they
take like victors, 'In hoc signet vincet.'
-
It is like madness and murder now,
the 'what can I see' viewpoint - men
barreling down highways from Kingston
to Mt. Bethel to Warren - erecting their
logical tents ten days at a time to
enchant the locals who, it seems,
less and less arrive to see. What's
a circus doing here anyway? 'Midst
dignity? Such as this is the modern day.
The Manager does not know and neither
do I, or they. My Martin Buber facsimile
tent is closing. (No man should need
suffer the fragmentary nature of his
understanding of his own life).
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