Academic journal article Parnassus : Poetry in Review
My Mothers's Elephants
Article excerpt
Because of their size, and the shape of their ears,
and the sweetness and wisdom she claimed to see
in their miraculously-lashed eyes, my mother,
for as long as I can remember, loved elephants.
At the zoo, she would linger, chuckling, before
their house, the babies in particular seeming to hold
some charm for her, their wrinkled legs belying
their years. Someone in cruelty had called her
an elephant once when she was a girl because of her size,
which she could not control, despite a diet of not much
more than cigarettes and over-perked coffee. Perhaps
her fondness for those creatures started then,
a way of turning the pain around, as after her death
I would tell my friends that it was easier to love
my mother now that she'd lost the burden of her body.
When she began to collect them-china, brass, and sea-shell,
carved into the tops of wooden or pewter boxes, blown
out of glass-it was a relief to all of us, I think, to have
something to give this woman whom almost no gift could please.
Now she had found one small, true thing that could never
fail her. Regardless of value, she adored them all, arrayed
them across her piano, her dresser, the windowsills,
as if, like guard dogs, they marked the perimeters of her turf.
She hardly went out at all then. The cough that embarrassed
her children, rising as it would at all the worst moments,
kept her at home. …