The Elephant
Sydney Lea
Bleary with booze again, a man looks out his window at an elephant, which he knows is a hill of dirt dredged up years back to make his pond.
It’s no more than a clot of gray today, yet for him, semblance is all: it’s his mind that has put the beast out there, great torpid thing, resigned to its death.
Last night the final sodden snow came, slush, really. The sun sits far off west, fog-dimmed, yet shadows appear like an odd set of anti-footlights, which fall all over his fanciful beast. That his elephant should be a figment seems sad. It had no chance, though, to be otherwise, except by being right here with a man who regards the world through his dirty pane, a man who’s slothful and sedentary, precisely as a dictionary would define those terms.
He harshly whispers to the heap, Get up! Which of course it doesn’t. The slush is thawing, and the clouds at dusk are ponderous. There will be no dramatic progression to some final act. The weatherman’s forecast was routine: Warming. More rain. Roads may be slippery.
Dead Joe-Pye-Weed juts up from what might have been the animal’s heaving flanks, whose shadowy blotches are merely the cuffings of skunks for grubs. There’s a pain in his chest, but no crisis, he thinks– same old banal heartburn. He fetches another warm gin to calm his nerves, or so he’d claim. The shaky nerves come on because he’s a witness to the commonplace as it reveals itself and it revolts him.
How much better he’d feel if only that elephant could rise up and gulp the pond and tear the trees from its banks, if only its monstrous blare could shatter this window! The man is histrionic, as ever.
Such small daylight as there’s been subsides, and the field looks empty, like a stage without actors, as if a curtain were dropping, no matter it never had lifted.
A former Pulitzer finalist in poetry, Sydney Lea served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. In 2021, he was presented with his home state’s Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published twenty-four books: a novel, five volumes of personal and three of critical essays, and sixteen poetry collections.
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