This is called Measuring Things Close Up.
My father ran away and joined the circus when he was 14
and I told somebody that just the other day.
It really reminded me, so I decided to read this poem.
First he had to water the elephants and at that time
he'd be carrying a lot of buckets of water.
And that's, with a bunch of elephants,
that is an awful lot of buckets of water.
And so he got promoted to being the dog-faced boy
in the sideshow.
He was a very handsome guy.
If I'd been half that handsome my life
would've been a great success.
Then he became an acrobat, then he quit and went back home.
Came from a well-to-do merchant family,
but he was the black sheep especially after he married
my mother, who was a daughter of a North Carolina sharecropper
family.
Wonderful woman and wonderful with each other.
Terrific.
So the circus always had--
I didn't know.
I mean he'd take me to the circus
and he would go over and talk to the clowns and other people,
particularly one clown, which I found out years later
was Emmett Kelly, the most famous.
What did I know?
But I would go to these circuses with big tents out,
the old tents, the great canvas tents,
like revival tents out on the dirt, straw bus dust,
set them up in the dawn.
For some reason I remember the first year
that they had Hawaiian guitars.
This wasn't the Ringling Brothers,
this was more like a carnival circus.
They drove me wild.
Like I was talking about Paradise.
I could almost hear something.
When I was a child I had this thing about lightning
was cracks in heaven and if you're quick enough
you could see into Paradise.
I worked on that because you have to train yourself,
because you can't stop to think.
It's like first for lights on, if you ever
played that game as a child.
You have to do it without thinking
because there's not time to see through into heaven.
So you have to learn it as an instinct.
Still to this day occasionally when lightning comes
I'm not thinking so I could look through.
The Hawaiian guitars was like I could almost
hear the answer, what I was looking for.
I'd spend all day just roaming or waiting,
because I need money.
I was a little kid, I don't know, 14 maybe?
In Pittsburgh that's young.
Maybe here it's young, too.
It's not young in New York.
Then I would hear the sound and I'd
go running as fast as I could over to this girly show,
which is where they were.
It's called Measuring Things Close Up.
This is a longer poem and it starts out
with the different elements.
It starts out with the elements of grease
and I just came from teaching in Alabama last year and stuff.
And you'll forgive me if the word
nipples occurs in the poem, but it's male nipples.
So it's the strong man.
In those days in the sideshow one of the things
was the man would put hooks through his nipples
and he would lift great iron weights.
Very impressive to a 14-year-old kid who was not brave.
Measuring Things Close Up.
The world is announced by oregano and thyme and sage
and rock.
This is the point that you can hear a sound,
you can see into paradise and sometimes
walking the mountains, where I was living at the time,
this poem was written.
There was another island.
I lived up on the top of the mountain.
And the oregano and thyme and sage grow wild
and the summers are fiercely hot,
like I guess here sometimes, and everything
is burned dry except for the oleanders, which
I see you have here.
Which is silly in that that kind of landscape,
to see pink oleanders, such a sentimental color.
The world is announced that as you kind of know that you're
getting close to the world.
The world is announced by oregano and thyme and sage
and rocky places high up with white doves,
higher than the blue sky above them, where women's
voices and the lemon trees below and the bright sea far
down under that, a discontinuous exigence that is the world.
Reading Paradise Lost in Alabama and thinking of lingerie.
For the boy in Pittsburgh, the only year
he was nine, prowling near the rusty railroad yard where they
put up tents and the man lifted anvils with chains
through his nipples.
The boy is listening for the Hawaiian guitars that
make him shiver as he runs across the new sawdust
to see again two women on a stage above his head, indolent
and almost naked in the ordinary daylight, reality stretching
thin as he watched the painted eyes brooding on what they
contained, a thing he did not understand but even then knew
was on the other side of flesh somehow.
As the music was contained in the mute guitars,
while the grinning man told lies about what was inside that tent
for only $0.50.
Now all these years later, a door opens into somebody
and we enter to find a sound maybe
like striking two stones together
in the mountain silence, or the noise of buildings burning.
The heart, in its plenty, hammered by rain and the need
and memories everywhere, trap doors and tunnels,
thunder and yelling inside me.
Empty streets were abandoned.
Taxis are not listening to the lights
turning from red to green and then red again.
Walking all night through sleeping Paris, visiting
the missing hotels where I lived in my 20s,
thinking how we get into bed with God
in order to participate in that size
and fail and yearn forever after to fail that importantly again.