ELEPHANTS 

​

Parched terrain repurposed into their skin
with so many creases and cracks,
I’m tempted to constellate
stories from it.

Sometimes elephants speak
in low—nearly inaudible—rumbles
that transmit underground. Up to
ten miles out, another elephant deciphers
the sound’s message in his foot.
 
It makes me want to ask: How
many miles deep can they see
inside each other? Maybe
they’re like us, looking
with telescopes into their parents’ dark
echelons for elapsed celestial
events, just now emerging, studying
light-patterns burnt into myth.

 

Elephants know of another’s death
from hundreds of miles away. We don’t
understand how this happens.
But they return to pay respects,
as if walking towards a single, starless
section of sky.