AN ELEPHANT CROSSED THE ROAD

An elephant crossed the road and everyone bowed to the ground.
He couldn’t play the piano. I told you that.
Worms came out only on dry days. A Copt hummed a verse.
Ten yards of cotton cut to the match. Two pairs of pinch pleated drapes.
Rivers drowned in each others mouths, and blisters were everywhere.
I saw the scar where the dog bit him when he was seven.
Lesions were so deep they broke the bone.
He rubbed the cloth between two fingers, just as I’m doing now.

There were two lines and a lonely man waved a wand back and forth.
He bought me two hotdogs so I’d leave the game early.
The man who played the violin got one potato. The other got none.
His stepmother took his soup away and gave it to the fat boy.
A boy stood in the distant doorway with an apple in his hand.
He went to the suburb where they judge your lawn.
There were no tatoo parlors, but everyone had one.
He had silk shirts and wide ties before it was fashionable.

The skin was so thin a light could shine through.
He learned a new word everyday. Imagine his vocabulary when he was forty.
Shoes were left before the gate, a disposal problem of major proportion.
He bought so many shoes, that even now, many remain in unopened boxes.
An elf walked onto a plank and said, “    it’s a shorter jump for me.”
He said that 90 inch drapes were 89 inches long.
That one inch made America rich.
The smell wrapped round the universe, as Churchill and Roosevelt puffed cigars.
A bedspread named for a President sold for sixteen fifty.

Crickets chirped one at a time. One at a time. One at a time.
A pancreas cancer starts with one cell which refuses to die.
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wagner – blame them, they’re all dead.
worked in our textile store once a week until I finished medical school.
Questions were posed after the facts, and the facts were altered everyday.
I never questioned why I went into Oncology until that day.
A child asks four questions on Passover. It takes 3000 years to answer.
You asked me why I treated him.
Don’t ask!

The Passover story is backwards. The angel of death smote the Almighty.
When I said it was pancreas cancer his silence filled our mouths to the brim.
The philosopher asked about the noise a falling tree makes in the forrest. Who cares?
There’s a sign on the comer of Grand and Eldridge with his name.
The town of Sambor used to be in Poland. Now it’s only in my memory.
His obituary was in the New York Times, of course.
The ground is filled with a million moles who’ll all come out on ground hog day.
Put it this way, am I supposed to only care for strangers?