There’s an old elephant

Wheezing song like a gummed-up harmonica
Outside the GUNS and PIANOS
BUY-SELL-TRADE

They call him Mephibosheth

Used to perform in a small circus

He was injured in transit

Made him nervous from chronic pain

He had already been a teenage hypochondriac
He read medical journals with a flashlight
Under the covers

Came across a lovely article about
Behavioural Management of Hypochondriasis
And it stuck with him
Like everything did

After the transport truck hit his left side

He tried to divert himself by listening to Dmitri
Shostakovich but

The man was incomprehensible

So he listened to his music instead

They sat there in the Brattleboro retreat

Feet sharing tub water with torpedo fish

A phonograph playing a nice little waltz

In a Yiddish style

Simmering on the turntable like mother’s soup
Ladled out with equal amount of love and passive aggression

Mephibosheth and Dmitri had this conversation
The music was their interpreter

They would sneak into the retreat tower

With a keyboard and Mephibo’s trunk-as-trump’
Play some American-Russian patchwork of
Melancholy

Against the rants written on the stone walls
Piano and trumpet weeping and laughing
Against and in harmony with:

Teachers are anointed censors and controllers
Dispensers of secular catechism

Turning bright minds into toiling hands
Drawing the blind on God's infinite sunshine

Upon their discharge

They zigzagged around the country side

The Connecticut River their companion
Windows rolled down as the autumn leaves fell
Like confetti over them

Red
Red
Red
And orange like a sunset

And you may say that Dmitri was never there
But his thoughts and his music are invested
In the old elephant’s memory

And he blows them out

And draws them back in

Drawing the curious from passersby