From the Fishouse

The elephant in the white room
is told to play dead, and she falls

to the gray floor, rocking a little
before going completely still,

only to wake again, rocking again
a few times to find momentum

and push herself onto a splayed
position on the floor, her legs

spread like a skirt, and then
the methodical lifting of each leg

so that each gains its footing,
each lifting her a little until she is

fully up, wholly still once more
until some voice in the room

tells her to die again, all of her
wrinkled bulk made blank canvas,

wet stone for an eye, the camera
moving around her as though

she were the center of a carousel
around which the other animals

galloped and leapt up and brayed.
On another screen, one man’s

rapture of grief is told in a face
gone blurry as paint sliding

down a wall, a woman’s crying is
an open mouth black with depth,

a woman prays, her hands knotted
into white roots, while another

man standing behind the others
cannot decide whether a howl or

a laugh is what’s needed in this
moment after they have been told

to think the worst thing they can
remember, the moment then slowed

to sixteen minutes of quiet film,
so that even the thoughtless blink

of an eye takes a few minutes
to satisfy itself, the pixels changing

like cells under a lens, the last
woman an opera of disbelief about

what has come to pass for them
in the dim room, her face a metal

of rage, the voice somewhere
demanding every form of sorrow

from them, and, having been asked,
this is how they had to answer.