‘Handsprings on her face’

_ Photo by waferboard

When she smiles, her lips perform with such grace

An acrobat does handsprings on her face.

Her nose quivers like an elephant’s trunk,

Stretching for peanuts or rooting in junk.

A clown’s arranged her cotton candy hair

And made her a whole sideshow at the fair.

As for lion trainers, you may surmise

Jungle cats stalk behind her gumball eyes.

— “One Ring Circus,’’ by Frank Robinson, a poet based in Ithaca, N.Y., art historian, director emeritus of the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and former director of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design

A pet squirrel on a leash with a feeder in a medieval antiphonary. This is in the Bruges, Belgium, Public Library. #squirrel