Don Kimball

Elephant’s Trunk

for my daughter and granddaughter

One mammoth snout,
plunked between a whopping pair of tusks,

limber as a shower hose,
yet stout enough to uproot trees and stack

lumber; dainty enough to curl its dactyls
around a school- 

girl’s pencil, to draw
sticklike figures, with ease, on legal

pads. Yet bad
enough, if displeased,

to squeeze
the squash out of a bratty   

boy or girl, or by
sneezing, cause,

with elephantine schnozzle,
a blast, the cuss
       
loud enough to trumpet
an intergalactic cataclysm —

a tusker’s typhoonery
heard clear back to its trunk- 

less, not-so-elegant
hyraxic ancestors. 

Summation

Some things occur for no good reason. Take this:
after years of absence, your only child comes home.
He’s there in the darkness where he’s always been,
and as you step inside the doorway, see
his shadow bounding toward you, it’s easy to
mistake him for a stranger, a man
with rape on his mind; and since you’re packing
what’s meant to give you that needed edge
to deal with threats of mayhem — which,
since Cain and Abel, bedevil men and women —
you reach for it and use it, as you’ve learned
from months of practice. Now, instead
of bottles, cans, those outlines of a man
coming toward you on the shooting range,
this outline of your son
on the kitchen floor.