JUGGLER'S CIRCLE

We're here in the city park,

Just gathered in a rose garden's periphery,

Bound by nettles

And the machinery of our own minds ­

'Til we breathe those balls skyward

(Then the slap, slap

Of the world's rhythm

Is in our hands),

Globes orbiting

In the music, the rhyme

Of circular meter.

 

We, park jugglers,

Enter through the whirring center,

This (w)hole formed by motion.

Through it, clouds drift like smoke,

The sky dreams away

Its milky blue life

Over these maples,

Past steeples, bureaucracies, bustops

To far dotted cornfields, farmers Distant hills.

 

Marjorie Norris

Buffalo, N. Y.

 

PERFORMANCE

Each ball moves

away from his world,

circling him

 

like a sun, a bird

in a tree with three apples,

five, or three hundred,

 

all the same apple.

Whatever comes down, he knows,

must go up again;

 

perhaps he was born

in China, or upside-down.

You might think him sly,

 

with a child's love for bright things

but his eyes ignore

whatever he's caught. One ball

 

is pretty much like another;

it's never enough.

 

David Keller

Roosevelt, N.J.