Essence of clown

A tradition of buffoonery goes back to ancient Greece. A character called Clown in pantomime was the creation of the London actor, Joseph Grimaldi (1779-1837), who pantomimed from age four.

Clown,
you are something else:
a laughable hodge-podge,
an assembly of the haphazard,
sultan of no place
without retinue or fanfare,
or sign to give us a clue.
You are a perversity
pretending to be no more
than a mischievous rogue
engaging in tomfoolery,
feigning in bits and pieces,
satin and scatter tatter,
untuckables trailing,
apple cheeks, cherry noses,
flippered feet the flat opposes,
toes turned fins, a pretense
flung by a knowing eye,
yet shy in a frightened sky
for fear no one will see,
and cry, ”Bravo! Bravo!”
Is it not true few do,
that understanding comes slow?

Do you know, pot-pourri,
that you are logical doctrine
seeping through the absurd?
A high holy norm enfleshed
for puncturing humans
gone elephantine? Uneasy
inflations who come
to see you and guffaw?
Are you aware, clown,
you give time and distance
to legions of the unconscious,
all essences of balloon
who float above ground
looking for stars to talk to?
A complex destiny, clown,
persuading us to come down,
entertain ourselves,
laugh to split our sides
and forego pomposity.
Why else your daybreak horn,
if not to rouse the stillborn?

Nothing is of more import
than your silly preening self
asking for our approval,
no one so slyly cunning
as to rely on shenanigans
to edify an audience.
Ruined we may be,
but you are intent
that harm not befall us
who come to the circus
at the Ides of March,
blue Mondays, black Fridays,
birthdays and funerals.
Clown character is more than
propping up the ruined
year after calendar year
in cahoots with chaos.
Balance is your proviso,
a cool hand on our fevers,
fire sirens shrieking all the while.
Panache in rags, professor?
Paradox plainer than plain.

You are our surrogate buffoon.
We need you to save our faces,
redeem martinets and martyrs,
warm our begging hearts.
Tall as a tower, wide as a door,
round as a sphere, a lunatic
bound and tied to an agenda,
you work us like puppets
to your hidden will,
as you vacillate, waver,
shilly-shally and seesaw.
In the wink of an eye
Saint Good or Prince Bad,
and when the fur flies,
a thing of gesture mimetic to us,
nothing said to implicate
the fools we mortals be.
No words, but your message
well taken by watching folk
who are sure as the rising sun
that clowns belongs to life
as antidotes to the malady
that imagines life without them.

You are the gaudy fulcrum
of calculable chronologies,
days, weeks, months,
years sliding into times
wherein you bumble
unhonored and little sung
under the rubric of clown,
while we, time-dizzied,
perform odd balancing acts
to steady ourselves,
count one, two, three
and dive into daily doings,
trying to keep track,
looking ahead, looking back,
trying to skew our view
to encompass yours,
largely unsuccessfully.
Wordlessly you say, “Beware.
Try your hand. Play clown
if you dare, but peril’s here.
Much red around, the floor
slippery as hell. Mind the fire bell.
Not a random sound.”

Essentially, clown,
you are a whispering thing
and cannot without loss
be said out loud.
Words do not carry you.
Commandeering elephants,
scooters, skates, by clown fiat
mopping floors with carrot tops,
usurping brooms for pens,
you mirror us in caricature,
helpless, at times benign,
more often ridiculous.
Noblesse oblige your code.
And with small prodding
we oblige as you ask
and take to heart
your boundlessness.
No grave can hold us.
The serendipity that tilts
gravestones at Halloween
for the sake of deadheads
is you, clown: Original glee.

Wist you, tatterdemalion,
from high clown embodiment
where great creation recreates
to astounding purpose,
(unsettling the moving dead
as a merest aside),
the matter is of more mystery
than we think. Slumbering
in the wake of the spume
of effervescent bubbles,
we do not comprehend you.
Were we to see with clarity
what seams the tatter,
reams the chatter
and heads the beer,
we’d root amazement here,
and you’d be a banyan tree.
As for us and what we’d be,
should the rooms of perception
be cleansed and we go free
as macaws in your branches,
probably life-to-life debtors
of the sly old Knowledge Tree.

Earning a clown’s salvation
in comeuppance and pitfall
for the sake of the circus,
you can not be too sorry
or leave too soon,
because you are unworthy
of so foolish a fate
as commands you to flail at life,
fall felicitously down,
an action which baffles,
but clears the mind.
The cosmos packaged you
for play on a circus floor,
tossed you out on your own
like a merman up from the sea
making land among us,
a unicity among the two-faced
to teach us clown lore.
In the dark of our shadows
where the appalled meet
the appalled, you find
heart enough to clown
among the uncomprehending.

You are not simply told, clown,
not easy to put to word.
A certain humility in cavort,
more than a little wicked.
Beggar for the gold laugh
which you earn, then disown
as coin not worth spending
by so splendid a clown
as Croesus whose wealth
has little need of words
when actions speak louder,
whether stumbling or not.
Instinct baiting your hook,
the line taut between us
for centuries past count,
we keep a fair balance.
Slacken the line and we swing.
You meet the absurd head-on
and give no quarter. Mirroring
you, we have no choice,
but to see what we see
and laugh wholeheartedly.

For Juliette Hollister,
Clown Extraordinaire
That we may take our performances lightly