print previewback SUE D. BURTON
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. 
All in All, Another Productive Day in the Thicket of
Disappointment
Somehow Myself Survived the
Night
The Woman Who Is to Be Sawn in Half
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)