Is This Scary? by Jacob Scheier

Author:Jacob Scheier [Scheier, Jacob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2021-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

Metamorphosis

Velocity, an excuse

for the way water betrays.

Your leap embraced

with hard indifference

as though when you fell

you froze the sea.

Jumbo Elegy

Paralysed force, gesture without motion

— T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

The cement elephant plays chicken

with a train, forever up ahead. With painted eyes

he stares down the ghost

of that locomotive. Makes it vanish.

The town’s barren tracks like casket handles

holding nothing’s ceaseless progress. Jumbo,

the world’s most beloved behemoth,

still as a golem. Insides stuffed

with sky. Real hide

on the Upper West Side. Tusks

at Tufts U. Heart

left in Ithaca. His likeness

watches like a sentinel

over the Giant Tiger,

Walmart, Canadian Tire,

the forensic psych hospital,

two methadone clinics, three Timmies,

and the charred remains

of a schoolhouse photographed by Google

the day it burned, turned

to a virtual eternal flame.

Some say Jumbo was a martyr,

charged the train to save young Tom Thumb.

But Fred says suicide,

and he’s not the only one. Sally

will just let you know

what everyone knows, but won’t say.

Jumbo was worth more dead.

It was convenient, is all,

when you consider Barnum

knew a lot of taxidermists. George reports

the tusks pushed up like daisies

through Jumbo’s brain. Candice claims

the train had the effect of a good poem.

Took his head right off,

so, it rolled like a deposed despot

from a guillotine. This, his gift

to the good citizens of St. Thomas,

in place of what’s been lost:

the trains, the Sterling Truck plant

and Ford factory, the jobs and the jobs

and the jobs. There are no angels

in Ontario, says the once great slave,

only a beast paralyzed, waiting

for the 8:20 to London,

arriving any minute now.

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