Title: Two Wing Circus

Author: Murray Edmond

In: Sport 9: Spring 1992

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, November 1992, Wellington

Part of: Sport

Keywords: Verse Literature

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Sport 9: Spring 1992

♣ Murray Edmond — Two Wing Circus

page 17

Murray Edmond

Two Wing Circus

Asked if there was too much evil in the world,
John Cage replied that there was just the right amount.

In one ring there's a more-marketeer
who sells a line in feeling gratitude.
In the other, the fat lady, whose word is flesh,
stands to sing a verse for supper.

If Picasso painted her he'd do it thin
as paint. In rose and blue. But he won't.
The last time I came here, in 1957,
driven in a Chrysler, a woman hung
from the rafters by her teeth. And hoopla!

The Waikato Winter Show,
The William Paul Hall,
all those years ago (ago!)
waiting for her fall . . .

Since then the family's lashed out, grown up
and written manuscripts about each other.
The long afternoon of nationalism has dawned twice.
The middle of the road is now the centre

of the universe. There were steaming great cheeses
so gross you couldn't get your arms around
and a model village full of model dwarves
who hammered happily. The heart bled because

page 18

their pain was not your pain. You became
political in the best sense of the word.
You won. Now the last of the 'great figures'
died last week (for John Cage, let a silence

rain). Reality's snitched on the show.
It doesn't even go. It's bust. The word ain't
flesh. The pity is she sings and sings and
sings and still the show goes on — monotonous

as mice who tread the wheel, as gaudy as
the juggler's fruit when trampled in the straw,
etc. Pay-back time for lost ontologies.
Whose take-home pay can pay the lawyer's fee?