Dan Chiasson

There is one mind in all of us, one soul, who parches the soil in some nations but in others hides perpetually behind a veil; he spills light everywhere, here he spilled some on my tie, but it dried before dinner ended. He is in charge of darkness also, also in charge of crime, in charge of the imagination. People fucking do so by flicking him off and on, off and on, with their eyelids as they ascertain their love's sincerity. He makes the stars disappear, but he makes small stars everywhere, on the hoods of cars, in the ommatea of skyscrapers or in the eyes of sighing lovers bored with one another. Onto the surface of the world he stamps all plants and animals. They are not gods but it is he who made us worshippers of every bramble toad, black chive we find. In Idaho there is a desert cricket that makes a clock-like tick-tick when he flies, but he is not a god. The only god is the sun, our mind, master of all crickets and clocks.

How to explain my heroic courtesy? I feel that my body was inflated by a mischievous boy. Once I was the size of a falcon, the size of a lion, once I was not the elephant I find I am. My pelt sags, and my master scolds me for a botched trick. I practiced it all night in my tent, so I was somewhat sleepy. People connect me with sadness and, often, rationality. Randall Jarrell compared me to Wallace Stevens, the American poet. I can see it in the lumbering tercets, but in my mind I am more like Eliot, a man of Europe, a man of cultivation. Anyone so ceremonious suffers breakdowns. I do not like the spectacular experiments with balance, the high-wire act and cones. We elephants are images of humility, as when we undertake our melancholy migrations to die. Did you know, though, that elephants were taught to write the Greek alphabet with their hooves? Worn out by suffering, we lie on our great backs, tossing grass up to heaven—as a distraction, not a prayer. That’s not humility you see on our long final journeys: it’s procrastination. It hurts my heavy body to lie down.