Schism in the animal republic
by Nicholas Messenger
[ poetry - july 12 ]
If elephants, as d’Ablancourt maintains,
have turned to worshipping the moon, it is their mass explains
the heresy. While weightless gnats do dances
in the beams of sunlight, riding on the crackle
of the air, the pachyderm equivalent of their trances
calls for help from gravity: the upward force
of weight is what facilitates their acrobatic
outbreaks of theology, a sense of lightness rendering them
sentimentally precarious. The yearn of the enormous
for whatever levity the worlds can lend to them
is pardonable. Look, the itching footpads of the vast
beasts puff out smoke rings, actually moonlit dust.
