by Gretchen Mattox
He's waving a plastic pointer, stiff flag enter lot here,
parking
at the edge of Lincoln--bright-yellow clown suit with bold
ruffles
and
floppy shoes
(the kind with stuffed toes) and from even a short distance
he could be
anyone degraded selling what?, he could be, but he is a man,
clearly
Mexican,
underneath the nose that honks, a black mustache, illegal
alien? probably.
Like the girls in bikini tops and grass skirts outside
casinos in
Las
Vegas,
who say Come get your free lei (colored plastic wrap á la
Hawaii), he does
what he's been told to do: on automatic, flag arm ticking
like a metronome.
Underneath the painted smile is another expression--harder
to place.
The urgency of traffic, who has time to care?
He takes his job seriously. On the way home, reverse route
back,
he's still there waving, a swimmer treading water.
From: Buddha Box.
Copyright 2004.
Painting: The Sad Clown, by Aiden Ivanov.
No comments:
Post a Comment