The Elephant  

How to explain my heroic courtesy? I feel

that my body was inflated by a mischievous boy.

Once I was the size of a falcon, the size of a lion,

once I was not the elephant I find I am.

My pelt sags, and my master scolds me for a botched

trick. I practiced it all night in my tent, so I was

somewhat sleepy. People connect me with sadness

and, often, rationality. Randall Jarrell compared me

to Wallace Stevens, the American poet. I can see it

in the lumbering tercets, but in my mind

I am more like Eliot, a man of Europe, a man

of cultivation. Anyone so ceremonious suffers

breakdowns. I do not like the spectacular experiments

with balance, the high-wire act and cones.

We elephants are images of humility, as when we

undertake our melancholy migrations to die.

Did you know, though, that elephants were taught

to write the Greek alphabet with their hooves?

Worn out by suffering, we lie on our great backs,

tossing grass up to heaven—as a distraction, not a prayer.

That’s not humility you see on our long final journeys:

it’s procrastination. It hurts my heavy body to lie down.