Even Birds Leave the World
So why lament a day without a heart, a Monday,
garbage day, the day my heart snuck out
the doggie door in a Mr. Potato Head disguise, leaving
me to wake listless, my eyelids limp, and my chest
silent as a stalled cloud.
Dread sucker-punched my inner weather, knocking out
the breeze I need to get out of bed, and with no heart
to motivate my left-leaning, lopsided love of life, I decide
the sun is fake, the multiplication table just a myth, coffee
must come from pellets kids in a tropical country collect
from elephant shrews, a relative of the pachyderm,
but small as a hungry rat, and the idea of an elephant
leads me to reach for an antique blue-bound book, half
the size of my hand, all I can lift with my blood at a standstill,
this demure volume, a gift from my ultra-beloved friend
with heart to spare, Elephants, it’s called, published oddly
by the Sunday School Department, 505 Broadway,
New York, 1917, and its tiny pages tell me an elephant
uses its trunk to cool itself with stomach liquid — dubious,
don’t you think? It dawns on me I’m hungry, and perhaps
I could shred the tawny brittle book pages for breakfast,
but no, I’m drawn to read more and discover, like us,
elephants shout, scream, and whimper, and I wonder
if their whimpering resembles my whimpering
and my worry about whether I’ll die happy.
I want you to know that after I was given this book, my friend
napped, and I explored his attic, pocketing a cut-nail
from two centuries ago. I figured he wouldn’t mind, believe me,
this guy would give you a peck of rose petals, a bushel of nickels,
the carpet of moss from his yard. He trims crusts from stale bread
before feeding ducks, and here he is on the phone now, singing,
“try a little tenderness,” his ninety-year-old voice buttery
gravel, and the song proves some moments can save you
from yourself, and lo and behold, my Mr. Potato Head heart
has returned to bring me breakfast in bed, latkes with applesauce,
Tanzanian coffee, heated to perfection by the sun, and my loyal
heart asks me what I want next — joy for the tender rescue
of my friend’s call or a multiplication table to calculate
how many elephants we need to replace their 30 percent decline
in the past five years and how much human will we’ll need
to wake up and do it.
* * * * *
My Cloak of Not Knowing
When I worry about the future I put it on,
woven for all I know from the fur of a cat,
the color of a honey pony who would follow me
stride for stride if I climbed the fence into his pasture
to wander, wonder about springtime
in Mongolia, without knowing who combs the winter
out of the hair of the small horses there and whether
they celebrate the first flowers with the Feast of Mare’s Milk,
which may begin at sunset and end at sunrise,
the yurts billowing with snores, but I know nothing
of that sleep, having been rained out of one built to host our visit,
when the wet sent us from the village to a near city
over rutted roads disrupted by boulders whose long slide began
from I don’t know how high up the steep hillsides, and at each place
they landed, Topchubek left the car to roll slimy stones to the side of the road
and we joined him, pushing together against weight that might outweigh
a monster ram butt, and though I don’t know who
pushed harder than who, we muddied our hands together, in silence,
and days later at the end of the trip, I don’t know if he saw me
weeping at the airport, not knowing how to tell him that his hours
and hours at the wheel had given shape to the kindness of his country,
nor could I have known that in the future of my journey
I would pay an astrologer to tell me, “Sorrow is like a faint sky,
and you will learn more loving both.” I knew I could spend
a lifetime not knowing how sorrow had become my second skin,
and that no matter how far I traveled, the sky would be the same
though disguised by different weathers.