George Looney

George Looney’s recent books include The Visibility of Things Long Submerged which won the BOA Editions Short Fiction Award, and The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible which won The Cider Press Review Editors’ Poetry Prize. He founded the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, serves as editor of the international literary journal Lake Effect and translation editor of Mid-American Review, and was co-founder of the original Chautauqua Writers’ Festival. website: https://georgelooney.org/about/

The Theory and Practice of Song

after Walker Evans’ Circus Trainer Leading Elephant, 1941

He’s on show for the week, this leviathan
so often ignored when he’s in rooms
crowded with well-dressed men and women
laughing and breaking into elegant foreign
waltzes on a whim. Some county fair
or other. Imagine him on trembling
haunches, pawing the air for children more
intent on corndogs or wiry clouds
of spun sugar. Can you hear the vulgar

music for his awkward dance? Imagine
his embarrassment is as cavernous
as the emptiness his bulk contains
and blunders through. That the man angling
his body, severe in his stance, wants to
lead this behemoth he loves and curses
away from all this, the forced poses
and the pathetic hulking which is
the closest the colossus can come to

dancing to the piped-in, tinny music
that debases the theory and practice
of song. But there’s only so much to be
done in this world and both know it. Both
led this way and that and denied again
and again anything akin to dignity.
Both lost in this clumsy dance
to a music once gleeful, winding down.
As if finally even air says No.