What Elephants Remember

[addy]

Matriarchs may store the most
in their cerebellum drawers:
shelves of maps to water holes,
photographs of their mothers'
bone and silent ivory,
white as marble in a field. Comparing ivory to marble in whiteness sounds a little superfluous, but maybe that's just me.


As a calf, those tusks had hung
in the air like strokes of thunder
chiseled from a cloud, only Gorgeous description. Super minor nit, not sure "in the air" is perfect... "suspended" or even "over her" would sound less unsure.

to unravel into dentin,
pulp, and blood as an adult "with age"?,
who may pass a graveyard with
names for every body buried
in the softened grass, not knowing
how it hurts to forget, too. Yeah, this is too much of a run on sentence i think

Very lovely piece, and what a joy to read. For some reason I read a little bit of a disjoint between the narrative in the first stanza versus the narrative onwards... perhaps because the first stanza seemed to make broader sweeping statements about elephant matriarchs in general, while in the second stanza you start to present more of a unique individual snapshot (as if it were the memories of a very specific "her"). Maybe pick one slant over the other (I prefer the latter tack actually)