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Finally at the Windowsill
My eyes, hungry for carved wooden animals,
run across the souvenir shop shelves, in love
immediately with the elephant. My most solid
carved animal, sixth-grade birthday present.
I hold his weight against the muscles of my hand.
I’m no longer certain about the elephant,
his left tusk missing since however long,
or the little Swedish horses, vivid orange
with floral tack.
I remember the Sarajevo artist
in a smoke-choked club, asking me, is this
a real American club or just a Boston tourist club?
These animals, are they folk art or what are they?
My poor deformed elephant, no longer true
to himself. One tusk out, who remembers when,
if I don’t nobody does. I regret that ivory
sliver. It’s just as well to have less ivory
around the house. Elephants killed for tusks
carved into tiny tusks for carved elephants.
A furrow of remorse, now when the elephant
in my hand is the elephant in the boy’s hand.
Wooden heron, found in an attic box
with the flat ceramic mask
I make in arts camp, to voice Aegisthus
in afternoon Drama. A child acting
slices of Greek tragedy, I almost believe
the adulthood they all predict.
And cat skull, jar-pickled toad.
I intend to become a zoologist
like my grandfather. For him, the biology
supplies catalog, poring over
the pages, not very fascinated
by science terms as compared
with my Baroque Oboe LP. But I’m
determined to analyze my two-specimen
collection, using the gaze-at method.
Fallen off, the cat’s lower jaw.
Gone dark, the toad’s preservative.
Aegisthus loses his lower jaw too.
The scientific remains shuttle to the dump,
but I save the broken face, both pieces,
carried from parents’ attic to mine.
The Swedish horses face an urn,
thumb-height, motionless on the piano lid,
holding grains of my father. He collects
elephants. I remind myself to re-see
this tribute. Here, his jewel-hide specimen,
plus his soapstone pachyderm, placed
in a ring with my orange horses.
In a Bar Harbor shop of assured
Maine-like artifacts, I walk straight at
a carved bear, mouth growled open
with two tree bark chunks mounted
as Northern mountains. My parents
buy her for me. She sees the piano,
the urn, the colored lights through
my mother’s windowsill glassware:
cruet, pitchers, loving cup.
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