Elephants and Butterflies

1.

I'm reading Roman history at dinner:
on the highway outside the restaurant,
feathers float from a chicken truck,
birds blinking in their boxes.

A flatbed deadheads along,
late for its lay-by,
running on bennies and Patsy Cline;
and then a glass truck shimmies

in the passing lane, panes angled up,
trussed and suctioned—
one hand out the driver's side, a cigarette.
Elephants everywhere, on the move.

                     2.

In the Second Punic War, on August 2, 216 B.C.,
Hannibal and the Carthaginian army
and his twenty-three surviving elephants
and his Gallic and Spanish cavalry

and everyone he could find who hated Rome
engaged the Roman phalanxes at Cannae.
The Romans poured into a breach,
deceived, lured there by Numidians—

then Hannibal curled back his lines.
More than 60,000 Romans died,
run through, then trampled by the elephants
trained to trample men. In his History,

Arripitus describes the gory scene:
the Roman captain, Varro, and his infantry,
stuck in the mud by a stream,
pinned to their slaughter like butterflies.

                     3.

On page C-1 today the monarch butterflies
are massing on their trees in Mexico,
millions more than scientists expected,
despite the killer frost.

I put down the Times, close my eyes:
A butterfuly is like a thought before it's thought.
A butterfly is what the air
would make into a thought.

The word "butterfly" comes from
the dictionary, flies out and beats
for three full seconds on the tip of a pencil.
The pages of the dictionary

flap their butterfly wings—applause.
Once I was captured by a butterfly
and taken to Butterfly City,
where the buildings are all flowers

bigger than houses, and no one lives there,
everyone is a tourist intent upon
the pageantry of other people's lives.
Luckily, I had my camera.

                     4.

As for the elephant:
once I was captured by an elephant
and taken to Elephant City,
where the dead like to visit

with the people who aren't born,
share sections of the paper
at cafes lined along the strand.
This is one advantage to being

captured by an elephant:
you go places.
It's why I like to read books.
The dead and the unborn toast,

dip biscotti in excellent coffee.
My elephant says we better leave,
she's turning back into a butterfly.
This is quite a statement:

I lay her trunk upon my shoulder
and brush her with the brush
I fortunately remembered.
This is one advantage to having senses:

you can tell where the elephant
likes to be brushed, console her.
I nod my head, she nods;
she gives a little trumpeted snort.

We leave together, wiser, friends,
return to the daily history
of our stupid lives—
she to the comics, and I to the news.

Copyright © 2004 Alan Michael Parker All rights reserved
from The Kenyon Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission