What Elephants Remember

[Todd]

Geoff,

We have the advantage of seeing previous versions. I can't say how I would have viewed this in a vacuum. My thought though is that you've moved into something entirely different. These may be two poems in a sequence but this does not feel like a revision to me. It seems like something else. I need to get my head more around it if I'm going to comment further. One call out though the "to be honest" feels too self conscious and out of place to me.

There are some good sequences here it just feels like a different poem.

Best,

Todd

V. 4

Drought had led us
to the water
hole, Uganda
grasses softer
than the sun
soaked dust.

Mother must have
known the time.
We lost her
until sunset;
could not tell
a flick of her

tail from the weeds,
or find a flash
of her tusks, once
hung like strokes
of thunder over
our own.

By then, the grass
was already caressing
her head, the way
elephants cannot, forgetting
how her missing teeth
had once devoured

its daughters—
how she had led
all of us
to do the same.
We found her
cold as desert

and, to be honest,
did not want
to take away
as much of her
as we did
as we left.






V. 3

What Elephants Remember

Behind the maps to water holes,
one matron keeps locked in drawers
photographs of her mother's
bone and silent ivory.

To a calf, those tusks had hung
overhead like strokes of thunder
chiseled from a cloud of grey,

stiffened into marble headstones
at the grave. The softened blades
fed her mother when the fields

dried, and soothed her jaws when passing
teeth too old to grow again;
held her head when death refused.

Queens cannot give back a crown,
just a name to those buried
in Uganda grass, not knowing
how it hurts to forget.







v2. still working on final stanza. minor changes thanks to billy

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 torn from mines.

To a calf, those tusks had hung
in the air like strokes of thunder
chiseled from a cloud, only

to unravel into plated
pulp and blood as an adult,
who may pass a graveyard with
names for every body buried
in the softened grass, not knowing
how it hurts to forget, too.







V. 1
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.

As a calf, those tusks had hung
in the air like strokes of thunder
chiseled from a cloud, only

to unravel into dentin,
pulp, and blood as an adult,
who may pass a graveyard with
names for every body buried
in the softened grass, not knowing
how it hurts to forget, too.