Elephant
Long cream-colored stipules and purple clusters
along the photosynthetic vine . . . a curious leaf-stalk.
Food-body stuffed with gum-yielding perseverance into the gray world.
Sabicu and shittah of the Bible, the ornamental mimosa,
glassy and monofloral, whose presence in the walls of the Ark means little
to the team of elephants devouring them in feathery shoots like animals.
Here and there, along a road, a rogue thrusts his anger like a black
valance on the other side of the window. A cigarette burns a hole
in a silk scarf, his anger raises itself, portending like a tube.
Anger, which is a black range north of the hangar,
is an angle, but no, it’s just an elephant on the Ganges.
North of Acholiland, a rogue smashes
a villager’s head with his ottoman foot.
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.
In the morning morning, I don’t know, I shot my pajamas, the ones with the feet, with my
elephant. One shot, I got in my morning and I don’t know. Hold the red elephant’s trunk
till he turns blue then shoot him with the blue elephant gun. One morning a blue elephant gun
rose out of the sea. It was the “precipitous collapse of elephant culture.”
Deep-rooted with memories an elephant remembers, too,
maize and firewood, also millet and Maramagambo
but on the way out of town will sound the deep-bass through her feet.
It’s a rumble for the allomothers and is the tensile, organized
bass string in the padding, which rubs along the skull’s lower jaw
of the mother, and her vocalizations, boiling the sea.
In their clown masks and ladies’ purses, the Lord’s Resistance Army
fashion an ear necklace, as the machete is hosed. Children in the mountains,
without toys and it’s Uganda, the blood thickening like purple stool.
Not the “murder simulators” of the suburbs which you’ve heard about.
A bone with the head of an animal, and its knives,
which slice babies like mouthfuls of golden hay.
The still-chained coax each other without
the blurred image sequence, cutting lips in outsize sparks.
Violations with heavy chains; industrial chain hangings; costly tranquilizer darts;
being fed a lighted cigarette. A portal into a 7600-pound woman. Standing vigil
the body turns in the green dust like etching. Dead woman, with sunken yolk eyes.
The thin outermost bloom pocked with distal craters teeming with bacteria.
The bindweed scorching at the window’s edge . . . on the other side of the diamond.
An elephant has a long memory.
Hotel with rotating registers,
chomping wattle with her black tambourine.
But her culture is torched like a torch song.
Destroyer-moms turning mighty & alee,
mourn the natal structure and lost elders.
Who has cut across species like a brain?
She long ago felt it in her mother’s womb.
When will she and I be as one?
