The Beast Between the Marble and the Heap, Or: The Mammoth

The Beast Between the Marble and the Heap, Or: The Mammoth 

Between the marble wall of City Hall  

and the slow‑rotting heap  

of broken crockery and dusty old books —  

the beast stirred.  

To think it once tore open the earth  

with its tusks,  

raising mountains,  

or guarding the spirits of the underworld.  

Now its fur rotted to a brittle husk —  

the mammoth  

preserved without reason —  

the mammoth.  

Among the first of God’s works,  

it had been among us from the beginning,  

and for the longest silence,  

its vast body pressed  

into the narrow seam  

between what we build and what we cast away.  

We’d walked past it for years,  

deaf to the ancient sleeper in our midst,  

blind to the colossal totem  

suspended  

between warm and cold, life and death.  

Older than civilization,  

older than walls,  

older than the first hand  

that shaped a bowl from clay.  

The thing you thought extinct  

is not  

extinct: 

Because last night in a dream it snorted and drew breath —  

One eye caught the light  

of a street lamp  

and the air thickened  

with the gravity of time.  

The inevitable awakening  

of something we forgot  

long before we learned to bury things.  

The mammoth blew its horn and shook the ground  

and the city remembered  

what it meant  

to really tremble.