Tuesday Poem - 'The afterlife of elephants' by Lynn Davidson

The afterlife of elephants

Here is the elephant at the bank

idly stirring up dust,

idly touching your shoulder.

Here is the elephant

thundering along the concrete expressway

on four unbending feet.

Here is the elephant hanging

from a whisky bottle, which is what happens

when you take him for a Grant's.

Here is the elephant with his landscape body -

those distant terraces up close reveal themselves

as ragged gouges from the rainy season.

Or perhaps it is inside the elephant

where the articulation of water occurs. Which is all

for the good. He is heating up as he gets older.

*

Here is the elephant

we have come far to see. Silk ripples

from the great wall of his spine.

Here is the elephant

to teach you about rhythm.

Watch the silk, it is rhythm's after-image.

If I were to write the deepest thing

inside me it would be this

elephant sound.

His eyes are so elephant

when he looks at me while

hooking up hay and feeding it into his mouth.

I try for detached

but really, I wish I could throw a beaded shawl

of water so delicately across my back.

*

The elephant is on his way, quick

open the window before he gets here

while there is still room for elbows and hinges.

Here is the elephant

breaking the spine of Contemporary Scottish Poetry.

There's nothing about bagpipes in there, elephant.

Did the elephant have to come

to the story-telling centre? I point to a busker

outside, playing flamenco on a uke. He ignores the bait.

So. Here is the elephant.

See how his heavy trunk droops, forgotten,

as he stares and stares at the mysterious paper sculptures.

The elephant does not know that he is also swaying

and people are stumbling back.

The elephant thinks he is standing still.

Here is the elephant.

There is no need for cats to give loneliness form,

because here is the elephant.

Every so often I meet up with Lynn Davidson, and sometimes it is in

Wellington, and sometimes it is in Melbourne. I can never be quite sure

when and where I will spot her. I think she is a bit of thistledown that

drifts to and fro, following the winds of her own purposes. Or something

very like that. Last time we met she popped up at Vincent O'Sullivan's

launch in Wellington. Just like that. There she was. But I wasn't very

surprised. For her to pop up, I have to pop up too. She was the Visiting

Literary Artist following on from me at the flat in the Square Edge in

Palmerston North, and although we exchanged emails we hadn't met

then. All this bumping into each other started happening after that.

And I was well pleased to bump into this poem in the latest Australian

Poetry Journal, because – well – I like it a lot. But as I started to type

it up I got quite a frisson as I realised it wasn't exactly about what it 

purported to be about. It's a real shape-shifter of a poem, deep down. 

But with an airy, insouciant surface. Nice!