After breaking his neck, silent film star Buster Keaton

            famously asked: if the audience laughs each time

he slips, trips, slides, stumbles, teeters, totters, or falls,

 

            isn’t it better to practice? This is the challenge

of partnership: to perform your own stunts. In the theater

            of our lives, my wife and I have often been physical

 

humorists. Feigning collapse. Faking a swoon. Fleeing

            the imagined train on its tracks. With each avoided

disaster, we cheered the indignity of survival.

 

            A thyroid mass her doctor first called “tumor.”

The sudden SUV, brake checking our bumper.

            A dream of turbulence

 

we’ve never forgotten. Harold Lloyd once claimed:

            “The more trouble you get a man into

the more comedy you get out of him.”

 

            I submit this is sage advice for drama

but poor advice for love. There’s a reason for theater.

            Not even the talkies could revise our need

 

for slapstick and clowning. See:

            Mr. Bean. See: Jackie Chan. See: my wife

screaming in the kitchen, pretending to fall

 

            into the fridge. There’s safety

in learning to take the dive, hit the floor, spring

            lightly back to your feet. To turn

 

even misfortune into hilarity. Beneath the high jinks

            and horseplay, rehearse for the worst

with a smile. May you practice the ancient art

 

            of the pratfall. The banana peels you slip on—

rinds you’ve laid yourself. May the clock

            you dangle from high over the city

 

hold you steadfastly in time.