Washing the Elephant
The river will protect you from her only so much. How can it, perched as you are on a forehead the size of a coffee table? As if washing a house with a toothbrush, as if swimming among the pyramids. What hope to deflect the powerful trunk but to stroke the animal’s scab-rough pate, to search her eye that rolls up at you from its bed of lashes, fathomless and too familiar? If largesse is what defines the elephant then for you it is the capacity to be bored. Yet aren’t you both vulnerable to sunburn and mosquitoes, suffering the attentions of those more forceful than yourselves, their desires for novelty and labor both attached to their attraction to your forms? The differences between you are obvious: her ancient, battered body which generates reverence the way your own generates scorn; her crushing, vulval mouth, her toenails big as lotus leaves. Yet, like you, she measures the world according to its reactions to her. From this, how can she not believe everything is scared? That, seeing us place her image among our other deities, we treat our gods as slaves? Meanwhile, inside her is the usual universe extending out and down, a dark that grows like a galaxy accruing new arms, gathering new meanings, stars behind stars. Only we want to be perfect. She has had to learn to withstand our love, bowing at the urgings of our knees, torn ears trailing in the river’s mud. She stands while we swim circles around her, swaying to the beat of her heart which, when you put your head under water, you can hear: that dark drum your own blood echoes; can feel as good as eternity.
