Falling Through Into Elephants

I.

Sylvie is counting trees.  She walks through

the woods she inherited from her mother

and runs her hands over the glassine bark.  If

she stands very still, she can feel the trees

moving.  By holding her breath, she is able

to convince herself that she is moving with

them, listing in the wind, dragging across a

continent, rotating around a core.  Usually,

when she walks, it feels like ice-skating alone

on a window, her feet sliding across life like

skin slips from a boiled peach.  Sometimes when

she sits, chin in palm, she fears her face could

slip away from her brain just as easily.  In the

woods though, she feels connected.  Maybe it’s

because, deep down, she believes her feet and

the soil are materially the same.  Or it’s the air. 

She knows it is as clear as the vitreous humour

within her eyeball.  She looks at the world and

laughs because her eyes want her to.  If her

brain didn’t flip it, the world would seem to be

floating.  It’s all about perception.  She pats the

leg, runs her hands over it, feels its warmth. 

Scratching the hide, she feels maternal.  This

one could have fallen through the soft mud

somewhere in Asia, just as her feet could fall through

themselves where she stands.  His mind is there,

but his legs are here.  Sylvie likes that her mind

and the elephant’s give her something to hold on

to.  Without her, he’d float away like Goodyear

in a high wind.  Realizing the trees, she begins to

count again.  Oaks, hickories, maples, and three

mulberries that bleed tears in the summertime. 

And then the tamarack.  She’s suspicious of that

one.  “Deciduous evergreen.”  From the corner

of her eye it seems like a pine, but straight on it

looks like she forgot her glasses—frowsy,

half-brushed and shedding. 

II.

Sylvie likes to walk Indian file in the fall and think

about James Fennimore Cooper.  She takes mincing

steps in her moccasins and remembers what it felt

like to walk on the edge.  She kisses a trunk and

croons, “Natty Bumpo.”  Daintily stepping on, but

not shuffling through, the leaves, she hears a drumbeat.

Despite that, walking softly, she leads with her knees. 

She doesn’t like the noise the underbrush makes when

she sweeps through it, a susurration that’s more like

a hiss than the breeze above her head.  Her shoes cast

shadows in the noonday sun.  She lifts one high and peers

beneath it, but what she’s looking for isn’t there.  The

drumming gets louder, and a woodpecker taps itself into

existence.  She knows that’s portentous: the black pig

always finds her.  Before coming to the woods, she

abstained from looking at the moon for month, didn’t

wear silver, braided grass into her hair, but it seems

that the ritual’s dead.  She touches the trees when she

counts them and tries to get her list right, but she knows

they sometimes multiply while she watches. Distractions

like that make her skin feel loose. Reaching out to knock a

strange mushroom from her wrist, Sylvie realizes that’s

what the pig wants.  Her skin.  A child’s sticker of a frog.  A

scrap of dried orange clinging to a stump.  She peels it off

and it leaps into the underbrush with a sound like rage or

wind chimes.  Looking at the place on her arm where the

frog had been perched all this time, she sees that she is now

as smooth as a baby’s eyelid.  Her nails are drips of tallow on

an altar cloth.  And when the pig appears, her heart unfurls

like a fiddlehead in spring.  She shakes water out of her hair

and it’s the drops in the spider web netted across a bramble

of blown roses.  Sylvie knows she is the pig now.  Through eating,

we become…

III.

One oak, two oak, three oak.  And there—

a first sassafras!  So slender time could

hide behind it.  Biting the inside of her

cheek, she tastes horehound and licorice. 

Something to be bought over the counter

at a general store while wearing calico.  She

looks at a broken branch, a drip of sap frozen

in motion, and wipes away blood.  It smells of

yesterday, of motor oil, and her hands are

as yellowed as roasted chestnuts.  A rim of

metal glints at her feet, and Sylvie slips out of

her moccasins.  The pig pushes its nose into

the soil, tastes oranges and hears a voice like

lumber—overhead and insistent.  There’s something

about the hickories that screams teenage daughters. 

She’s glad she doesn’t have any.  The air is too clear,

the bark under her nails too rough, her watchband

too tight for the elephants to balance.