Isn't it always the heart that
wants to wash
the elephant, begging the body to
do it
with soap and water, a ladder,
hands,
in tree-shade big enough for the
vast savannahs
of your sadness, the strangler
fig of your guilt,
the cratered full moon's light
fueling
the windy spooling memory of
elephant?
What if Father Quinn had said,
"Of course you'll recognize
your parents in heaven,"
instead of
"Being one with God will
make your mother and father
pointless." That was back
when I was young enough
to love them absolutely though
still fear for their place
in heaven, imagining their souls
like sponges full
of something resembling street
water after rain.
Still my mother sent me every
Saturday to confess,
to wring the sins out of my small
baffled soul, and I made up lies
about lying, disobeying, chewing
gum in church, to offer them
as carefully as I handed over the
knotted handkercheif of coins
to the grocer when my mother sent
me for a loaf of Wonder,
Land O'Lakes, and two Camels.
If guilt is the damage of
childhood, then eros is the fall of adolescence.
Of the fall begins there, and
never ends, desire after desire parading
through a lifetime like the
Ringling Brothers elephants
made to walk through the Queens-Midtown
Tuunnel
and down 34th Street to the
Garden.
So much of our desire like their
bulky, shadowy walking
after midnight, exiled from the
wild and destined
for a circus with its tawdry
gaudiness, its unspoken
pathos.
It takes more than half a century
to figure out who they were,
the few real loves-of-your-life
and how much of the rest—
the mad breaking-heart
stickiness—falls away, slowly,
unnoticed, the way you lose your
taste for things
like Popsicles unthinkingly.
And though dailiness may have no
place
for the ones that have etched
themselves in the laugh lines
and frown lines on the face
that's harder and harder
to claim as your own, often one
love-of-your-life
will appear in a dream, arriving
with the weight and certitude of
an elephant,
and it's always the heart that
wants to go out and wash
the huge mysteriousness of what
they meant, those memories
that have only memories to feed
them, and only you to keep them clean.
Barbara Ras, "Washing the Elephant" from The Last
Skin. Copyright © 2010 by Barbara
Ras. Used by permission of Penguin
Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: The Last Skin (Penguin Books, 2010)
