Elephant Dance, and: The New Giraffe, and: On Being in One Place Too Long, and: A Logical Proposition to His Coy Companion outside a Tropical Beach Cabana, and: Aftershock
Rent from DeepDyve- Elephant Dance, and: The New Giraffe, and: On Being in One Place Too Long, and: A Logical Proposition to His Coy Companion outside a Tropical Beach Cabana, and: Aftershock
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- Elephant Dance
Her left foreleg is chained to a stake behind the grandstands while the clowns, the strongmen, high flyers, and fire-catchers are catching everyone’s eyes.
She sways to her own music, starting at two out of four of the corners of her world, first dipping her left shoulder and left ear down and out and up and around with an air of knowing what her center of gravity, nearly always six feet or more aboveground, can do with her gray matter by moving it here, then there in an even number of ways through each diagonal, through her own choice of angles, and when she lifts the coil of her trunk and a limber knee we can see she isn’t now Elephant Following Elephant Around Three Rings or Elephant Earning the Right to Eat, but Elephant by Herself and as Herself Alone. [End Page 170]
- The New Giraffe
This mother is so far aboveground, so high above a birthplace, her two concerned keepers have spread straw under canvas and more straw over where she might buckle and kneel, give in, lie down somehow, but when the time comes, she doesn’t. She stands mute, her legs stiff, spraddled foursquare, her neck up tight and straight to the horns and the upright tufts at the ends of them, while she’s delivering the awkwardly half-unwrapped blood-slick bundle which arrives so thoroughly, it has almost nowhere left to fall when it falls, and now she staggers aside and lowers her whole half upper self to unfold and disentangle these shoulder joints and knees, to separate new eyelids with her tongue, to help it balance, to stretch its neck as far as it goes, to learn how high it must rise to be what it must be. [End Page 171]
- On Being in One Place Too Long
Seneca said there was no such thing as a favorable wind for a man who doesn’t know where his ship is going. But if that man doesn’t care where he’s going, isn’t each shift, each turning of baffled air over water a fresh beginning of a journey somewhere stranger, more surprising, and a cause for singing? [End Page 172]
- A Logical Proposition to His Coy Companion outside a Tropical Beach Cabana
Here on the shelf of a continental platform we’re lying on sand in a swash of wind while combers pound at our feet, pound on insoluble quartz, which takes on waves by simply giving in, taking any old drop of water and wheeling it up and around and down again where all of them more or less came from in the first place. Dear companion, every cubic mile of ocean is holding trillions of pounds of salt, thirty billion dollars in gold and silver, enough raw life to start another planet. So think of us logically. The wind, the sand, and the breakers landing on terrigenous ooze—what are they worth to us who look and listen briefly? They have all the time they can squander to come apart and come together again, but you and I are fires in a frigid world. No matter where we hide them, they slip away from all our interiors and surfaces to the tune of the old Second Mother-in-Law of Thermodynamics—Struggle to keep your heat from going somewhere colder. Shouldn’t we go out of this wind to a seabed of our own? [End Page 173]
- Aftershock
The old workman climbing the shaky ladder and going out to replace the bricks under the shaky cornice of the corner window on the third and last story of the shaky building that barely made it through the tremors of last week’s earthquake has had...
