Once I hid behind a tree and watched a mime

“I have the most tender feeling and nowhere to apply it.” — Karin Gottshall

 
On the first day in Prague, I started walking, my path
not so much a path but a condition of stumbling,
and because I am loyal beyond measure or because
I needed a homing ritual or a meditation or a foothold

against the crisis I brought with me, I kept walking
the same course each day without deviation.
Up a wooded hill, over the sad brick wall,
through an abandoned rose garden, past the tourists

clamoring for hot dogs, along a narrow walkway
where a mime was stationed at the end, the only way
to advance, toward him. Past the mime one was either
led back down the hill or through a pear orchard

in front of a monastery, and perhaps I walked the path
simply to keep arriving into the ancient ringing of its bells,
I wanted to arrive there as if by accident for the rest of my life.
Or it was also the mime, how awkward and direct

it was to approach him, like approaching the god
of my childhood at the end of a corridor
holding his slim gold book, my life curled
in a question mark. With his tragically happy face

and silent white hands, the mime courted my presence
from a hundred feet back. How he managed the charm,
the not-looking-away. I tried every day
not to look away as he unwound his sprung limbs

and planted the air with his astonishment.
We saw each other and did not see each other,
but the more I ended up there, pointed toward his giant face
which seemed so happy, so lit with awe as again

I headed forward, as I had my whole life
whenever my name was called, got up from my seat
and walked toward the awkward consonants.
Whether for award, punishment, or for the waiting room’s

banal errand, it did not matter, I always rose
toward the calling, leaning into it with a kick in my gut,
smile that answered a devastating yes.
Patient in his awe, to make it beyond him

was to be both relieved of awareness and to feel
painstakingly seen, a kind of adolescent ritual
before entering the silver arms of the orchard.
As the days became weeks, I got better at walking

toward him, if this is something one can excel at,
having made a practice in comfort, but I wanted also
to see him without artifice, began turning back
to watch him greet the others buckled in their shyness,

nearly spilled as they confronted the silent laugh
of his sentient hat, and on my last day, confess I hid
behind a tree. Certain of the lull, he hung up his smile,
shook the wonder from his fluid body, discomfort

waiting just beyond the surface to flood in, and then
the gaze was all mine, staying on to see him scowl
at his watch, stretch, yearn for an elsewhere. Tender, sinister,
I took this, as the noon bells vibrated up through the trees,

his wonder and angst sliding on and off as two airs,
and so rapt, I forgot I was hiding at all until he faced me
standing beside the trunk, levity drained from his face.
I held up my hand and gestured hello or goodbye or

I’m sorry or thank you, my shame, I did not turn away,
the moment ended in a helpless bow. Bells, coins,
delicate birds in the folds of his jacket, I’d never
understood that loneliness can be worn like a groove

until the familiar path occupies a circle next to happiness
or that a person can revert to its steady pang and still
crank on his upturned face, brush arms off and open
tiny doors in the wind, then face the people

coming into view, the ones who keep walking toward
all day, with his white hands reaching out to catch them.

ξ

Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of four poetry collections: Foxlogic, Fireweed (Backwaters Press/Univ. of Nebraska), Little Spells, How to Live on Bread and Music, and Salt Memory. A collaborative chapbook with poet, L.I. Henley, called Dear Question, is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press in 2024. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the James Laughlin Award, and the Terrain Poetry Prize, her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Birdcoat Quarterly, On the Seawall, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, and Waxwing.