the elephant

Somethings, by rule,

you can only use once. Like the same word in a poem

or "forgive me"/ just this once.

And forget what you've heard.

Elephants do not dream of

savannah's or fluctuating geographies

nor without the spallation

of stage-fright.

The big males

take their marching orders

from the way they feel at home

in the thicket of futures.

There was this dream of me and

Coltrane  and Ginsberg

and the girlfriend from 84

(whose name i've forgotten)

where no one wants to talk, secured

that the ritual of modality

had been won.

But I still love hard; fall in love too easily

if you can bake a cake or walk thru the house in

a lavender slip, and who really wants, anyway,

their miseries marbled

as ancient cities? Mark Anthony"s words

upon learning of the supposed death of

Cleopatra:

"Now all labour mars what it does",

or

in other words, my being alive

is insufficiency enough. And what

the elephants know about being

would penetrate the universe like 

a newborn. Grandpa worked himself 

silly, so it seams, on a plot of land

that wasn't his. And since then

I wanted the sour-grass of bliss

before the dew closes down

the spirits of the nightshades.

(i have collected many perfumes

arranged as epithets in a wood i've

labeled "star away")

Nothing much is left now of elephants,

despite what the emperors say, or of

free jazz or Ginsberg, and free

verse without it's blood-born sorrow.

Poetry now is the summing over

of all possible values of the other

less important human variables.

Wasn't the world better during bop?

Wasn't the ghetto a far less

burdensome place when the girlfriends

you invited for lunch wouldn't run

their fingers thru your bald scalp;

before it's friction ignited that moon

you called your face.

Reviews

[W.k.kortas]

I suppose you could shake your head and say "Well, there's that dana, off on a ramble again', and this piece is more conversational than most of your work (or maybe it's just more Ginsberg-esque?), but there is a clear and palpable order here, from the great bull elephants in the beginning to the lamentation of what was, or those things we've missed out upon, perhaps even a lament for the lost vigor of youth (I kept hearing Hemingway in my mind here, but perhaps it was the jungle and the elephants which made that so--in any case, there isn't the self-pity that lurked around the edges of the later Hemingway here.) The last stanza is simply powerful, as arresting as anything I've read in a long time.

[Corset]

Did you know that elephants go to a bone yard to die, they lay their pitiful bodies down among the other old bones and grieve for who might be left behind remembering them when they young and there to mourn for another old elephant who can't forget, they mourn, because elephants never forget.splendid as always.