Elephant


(For Ed Field)

He liked the monkeys & the hippos,
the polar bears, & even the birds,
of course…
but most of all, he loved the elephants.
The elephants were dependable -
solid and definite as the paperweights
he’d played with on his father’s desk.
You could trust the elephants.
“The elephants,” he said,
“the elephants are my friends.”

So he learned their stories,
their way of speaking, their private jokes
& what they knew of love and keeping;
& by the time he was nine,
had mastered their vocabulary,
committing to heart their logarithms & astronomy.
He could walk like them, talk like them,
& even recall small facts about
some of the really great one
who’d made big names for themselves.

On special days,
before he was allowed to travel on his own,
he’d go with his father to the zoo
to say hello to his mates -
the Indian & the African -
waiting for the keeper to come
with leaves of hay,
or brush & bucket to scrub them clean,
transforming their skin
into an ineluctable rubberiness.

By the time he was eleven,
he knew their gestures & their joys,
imagining a life in other countries,
free of cages,
before Loxodonta africanus stumbled
accidentally
into a crowd of peanuts & boys.


As he recalled it,
to touch the eye of his first elephant
he would’ve needed a hook’n’ladder;
it was so high, its grey head
scraped the ceiling in the animal enclosure.
Outside, you would’ve lost it
in a cloud.

Lost - the child grows down into the man.
And year after year, the elephants grow smaller.
The big one - though he searched for it everywhere -
he never saw it again.

Behind the locks that keep us safe,
inside the Sundays of our brains,
hordes of creatures are detained
that can’t be fed & won’t be named.
We play our parts.  The strongest cage:
the human heart.
Not good, not bad, not false, not true.
The incomparable comfort of sawdust
contains the fool. 

© Billy Marshall Stoneking