I continue to be amazed by Natalie Diaz’ gifts.  Last week I shared Cloud Watching with you, today it’s The Elephants…just amazing.  They come from her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, published by Copper Canyon press – which has a poetry dowser that never seems to come up dry.

The Elephants

                                        Hast thou not seen how thy Lord dealt with the
                                        possessor of the elephant?
                                        al-Fil, sura 105, Qur’an

 

My brother still hears the tanks
           when he is angry–they rumble like a herd of hot green
                     elephants over the plowed streets inside him, crash through

the white oleanders lining my parents’ yard
           during family barbeques, great scarred ears flapping, commanding
                    a dust storm that shakes blooms from the stalks like wrecked stars.

One thousand and one sleepless nights
          bulge their thick skulls, gross elephant boots pummel
                    ice chests, the long barrels of their trunks crush cans of cheap beer

and soda pop in quick, sparking bursts of froth,
          and the meat on the grill goes to debris in the flames
                    while the rest of us cower beneath lawn chairs.

 When the tusked animals in my brother’s miserable eyes
         finally fall asleep standing up, I find the nerve to ask him
                  what they sound like, and he tells me, It’s no hat dance,

and says that unless I’ve felt the bright beaks of ancient Stymphalian birds,
         unless I’ve felt the color red raining from Heaven and marching
                  in my veins, I’ll never know the sound of war.

But I do know that since my brother’s been back,
         the orange clouds hang above him like fruit made of smoke,
                  and he sways in a trancelike pachyderm rhythm

to the sweet tings of death music circling
         circling his head like an explosion of bluebottle flies
                  haloing him–I’m no saint, he sighs, flicking each one away.

He doesn’t sit in chairs anymore and is always on his feet,
         hovering by the window, peeking out the door, Because,
                  he explains, everyone is the enemy, even you, even me.

The heat from guns he’ll never let go
         rises up from his fists like a desert mirage, blurring
                  everything he tries to touch or hold–

If we cry when his hands disappear like that, he laughs,
         these hands, he tells us, those little Frankensteins
                  were never my friends.

But before all this, I waited for him
        as he floated down the airport escalator in his camouflage BDUs.
                An army-issued duffel bag dangles from his shoulders–

hot green elephants,
        their arsenal of memory, rocking inside.
                He was home. He was gone.