The Woman Who Is Sawn in Half Thinks about Elephants: Marianne Moore Feeding Them Bread at the Circus & Houdini Who Made One Disappear (& Was Not "Uncomfortably Popular" with Them as Was Miss Moore)

All I can say about elephants, really, is that they’re big.

Big & lonely.

I like them because they have big feet—big lonely

feet—& great big trunks: forty-to-a-hundred-

thousand trunk muscles.

(O, haul me, huge heart.)

My neighbor who’s an ecotourism expert tells me it takes

some time to train an elephant to carry a stranger.

My friend who reads past lives says I’ve always

lived in the desert.

Remember when everything had future tense?

Tromp. Tromp. Psychopomp.

Poetess with heft.

A lonely trudge, one supposes, to the perfect world.