ATTICS AND ELEPHANTS

A boy at the zoo peering through 
the bars hears someone say,

elephants never forget anything, and so

my father’s fascination begins…

and the family follows suite
with books about Barbar,

and later with the stuffed animals,

one then many, a posse of pachyderms

all dressed as cowboys amassing 
in a boy's bedroom, until 

the collection eventually is out grown

and relegated to the attic

and is forgotten,

and then forgotten again

when the house, decades later,

is sold with the elephants in it,

and then one day, years after the sale,

my father, a man in his fifties, remembers,

I left them there, when we emptied out the house.

How could I have forgotten them?

which is a detail that was never included

in any telling of the story I was told

of how and why the house got sold

and the grief that came with it,

not until more decades had passed,

not until I was a man in my fifties,

and was hearing once again

the story of how my father had to sell

his father’s house because he was

too sick to stay there,

only then, in that telling,

that time, for the first,

were the attic and the elephants 

added, who knows why

they were there then 
and weren’t before,

maybe it was because death and dying

and the prospect of emptying out 

another house was on everybody’s mind,

but the attic and the elephants

were there, were finally in the story,

like the baby buggy found in the attic

was there and was a part of the house 
my parents bought in Oregon 

when they bought it
twenty-odd years ago, 

and maybe, because houses have attics

and are often full of hidden treasures, maybe

because of this and so many other things,

I am now thinking

elephants don’t forget,

but humans do,

which has me wondering,

what else has my father forgotten

to tell me, what else

about his life

have I forgotten

to ask about.

THE CHARLATAN

My liniments and my nostrums can’t cure you.

The commedia dell'arte in my dog and pony show

are all a masquerade. The what 

in what I’m selling has no why. 

That’s what’s missing: the why, 

the raison d'etre. Without it all my actions 

are charade and chicanery. Without it

there’s no trust. And without trust 

the tincture has no tonic.

ADAM’S APPLE

A new ridge

just there,

course

as rope.

A lid or lip

dozing, mute.

Numbness stitched

into chakra.

Oracle blind

to prophesy.

Scar that recalls

its surgery

with every sudden

swallow—

and the taboo

fruit,

its blight
and the bite taken.

THE LINE

Inch long

and only

centimeters

deep, and yet

it is

the deepest

line I know,

deeper than

any canyon

I have traversed

and longer than

any Himalayan trail

I’ve thought to travel—because

it is written on my body

like a threshold

that only I could cross.

And yet, in the making

of this one thin line

a greater line

got written, drawn

by kindness, generosity,

and love: a circle

made by many

that held and kept me

safe before, during and after

the surgeon turned 

my flesh and my life into 

poetry once again.

THE BIG GULP

for Standing Rock and the Water Protectors

I drank a big glass of prayer

the other day.

It took five gulps

to get it down.

When the glass was empty

I was full,

and my throat 

was clear and clean,

and my voice, my voice

wasn’t mine anymore,

so it sang

like a river

liminal with light,

where all voices meet

as one tongue that snakes

safely and harmoniously

through ancient

and ancestral lands.