In the darkened room
I step up to the mic
with my single poem
and two beers,
always two,
but nothing happens.
The Big Dipper just sits
there in the sky saying,
“I’m the fucking Big
Dipper.” Then it’s silent
and a bit menacing,
reminding me of old
stories like the time
when the elephant
disappeared
from our town’s
elephant house.
I read about it
in the newspaper
while eating a roast beef sandwich
and thinking
with the elephant gone
the town should get a cat,
a pile of them,
a bundle mewing
and pointing the way,
“mew mew,” to the ice rink,
“mew mew,” to the golf course,
or perhaps
something else,
some other message
would hint at the whereabouts
of the pachyderm.
And yesterday
afternoon at a sound
I looked up at a kind
of buzzing, a droning
musical mew
and an aeroplane
soared straight up,
…and wreathed
upon the sky in letters.
But what letters
were these, those?
I went seeking them
up the Space Needle
with a lover.
and an old timer
up there wondering the same
offered to take
our picture, to capture
the millennium
with the press
of a wrinkly finger
to the screen of my
phone.
And the finger
pressed, the finger
captured,
and a night turned
into a lifetime
to be gazed at, longed
for years from now
when wrinkly myself
I pull past lives
from a box
and say to anyone
who will listen,
“There she was!”
But back to the letters.
Only for a moment
did they lie still;
I looked on
and the aeroplane again, in a fresh
space of sky,
began writing a K,
an E,
a Y perhaps?
I was never able
to discern,
not exactly,
but often at night
I drink and study
the map
on the wall, the world
map,
and I raise my bottle,
singular in this
instance,
knowing
I could be anywhere
in the world tonight,
with anyone
speaking any language,
but I am here,
only here,
speaking
the only language
I know
while imagining lovers,
“No more stories.”
She grabs my hand
and leads
me to the couch, puts
Julia Massey
in the CD player, cranks
it up. “Let’s just listen
a while.”
And the music ends.
And the papers print
almost nothing about
the elephant anymore.
I step away
from the microphone
with my two empties.
I put some cash
on the bar and walk out
toward the rest
of the poems.
And that’s when I see
it, the elephant,
hiding behind a tree,
a redwood, I think,
but that can’t possibly
be, not here.
I approach it
not cautiously,
and when it sees
me it begins wagging
its tail and mewing
and the Big Dipper
tilts, empties itself
of fresh dripping stories
and the newspaper
writes again
in headlines
I can discern
but will never
fully understand.
AUTHOR'S NOTES:
Italicized text borrowed from Mrs. Dalloway (Virgina Woolf) and The Elephant Vanishes (Haruki Murakami).
Julia Massey is worth a listen: https://themusicbook.bandcamp.com/track/aghadoe
Dave O'Leary is a writer and musician in Seattle. He's published two novels and has had work featured in, among others, the Daily Drunk, Versification, and Reflex Fiction. His collection of poetry and prose—I Hear Your Music Playing Night and Day—will be published in June 2021 by Cajun Mutt Press. Twitter: @dolearyauthor