Washing the Elephant

Isn't it always the heart that wants to wash the elephant, begging the body to do it with soap and water, a ladder, hands, in tree-shade big enough for the vast savannahs of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt, the cratered full moon's light fueling the windy spooling memory of elephant? What if Father Quinn had said, "Of course you'll recognize your parents in heaven," instead of "Being one with God will make your mother and father pointless." That was back when I was young enough to love them absolutely though still fear for their place in heaven, imagining their souls like sponges full of something resembling street water after rain. Still my mother sent me every Saturday to confess, to wring the sins out of my small baffled soul, and I made up lies about lying, disobeying, chewing gum in church, to offer them as carefully as I handed over the knotted handkercheif of coins to the grocer when my mother sent me for a loaf of Wonder, Land O'Lakes, and two Camels. If guilt is the damage of childhood, then eros is the fall of adolescence. Of the fall begins there, and never ends, desire after desire parading through a lifetime like the Ringling Brothers elephants made to walk through the Queens-Midtown Tuunnel and down 34th Street to the Garden. So much of our desire like their bulky, shadowy walking after midnight, exiled from the wild and destined for a circus with its tawdry gaudiness, its unspoken pathos. It takes more than half a century to figure out who they were, the few real loves-of-your-life and how much of the rest— the mad breaking-heart stickiness—falls away, slowly, unnoticed, the way you lose your taste for things like Popsicles unthinkingly. And though dailiness may have no place for the ones that have etched themselves in the laugh lines and frown lines on the face that's harder and harder to claim as your own, often one love-of-your-life will appear in a dream, arriving with the weight and certitude of an elephant, and it's always the heart that wants to go out and wash the huge mysteriousness of what they meant, those memories that have only memories to feed them, and only you to keep them clean.