Heading back

Gonna put out my suet and sunflower seeds and see what I can stir up out of the Michigan Woods. Leaving Sunday and hope to stay long enough to see the spectacular fall color. This fellow was very fond of suet a year ago. He's quite shy, so I had to take the photos through the kitchen window. See what a woodpecker can do to a tree? I must admit that the tree wasn't in great shape, but now it has given up. A woodpecker has some kind of mechanism that protects its brain from damage as a result of the repeated impacts. Several years ago, a pair of Eastern Bluebirds nested in a woodpecker-made hole in a tree behind the house. But by the next year the tree had blown down in a windstorm. Not everything turns out the way we think it should, as in this prose poem. (My grandson says poems must be rhyming and metrical, but Vern Rutsala wouldn't agree.)

THE LITTLE CIRCUS

It advertised the only trained hippopotamus in the

world. We had to see that. It was Iowa and it was sum-

mer with all that oppressive heat. The tent was small

and there was only one ring, the grass inside it scarcely

trampled down---not a good sign. Early on we noticed

there weren't many performers but they put on differ-

ent costumes and took different names, too, for each of

the acts, Part of the fun was to spot them in their new

personas. The buxom bareback rider switched to tights

and labored up the trapeze. We decided they were all

one family, Finally, the hippo entered looking smaller

than we expected—maybe it was one of those Iowa

hogs in disguise. An older man, the catcher in the tra-

peze act, walked the hippo slowly around the one

ring. It shuffled along looking none too happy and

then disappeared through the tent flap. You asked,

What's the act? What does it do? I said, I'm afraid

we've just seen it.

Vern Rutsala in A Handbook for Writers; new and selected

Prose Poems, White Pine Press, 2004. Page 57.