Mobile

Acrobats go about toeing the line

Of Alexander Calder’s sun circus

Then reach and dive and loop and circuit just

Where he bends wire into finer design.

That we know, and we don’t know everything,

The universe does not hang from the ceiling

By an eyescrew, yet everything’s wheeling

One way or the other is the feeling.

One way is to say everything’s mobile,

Alexander cross-legged in three-piece suit  

Twisting metal with his pair of pliers

Into gravity’s densest high flyers.

Planet discs he straightened with his boot

Slow drift lift in the airflow for quite a while. 

Photograph of Calder mobile at the NGV by Carol O'Connor, August 2019