The speaker remembers a father who handed over his dreams and then left to join the circus. The gift is strange: he puts the dreams in his child's palm and closes the hand into a fist, as if to say "keep these safe, I can't." Then he becomes a contortionist, a man who bends himself to please a crowd.
The second part shows what that life costs him. He wipes his boots with his own face, and the children who watch are covered in mud, shrieking in horror. The setting is all cheap sweetness and mess: spit, sawdust, cotton candy. The final image is the saddest. Papa sends his loneliness home "in a box for laundering," as though it were a dirty shirt someone else could clean.
The mood is tender but bleak, with dark humor running through it. The speaker seems to feel abandonment mixed with pity. The poem suggests a father who gave up his own dreams, and his dignity, and can only reach his child through odd, wounded gestures.