NIGHTSHADE

Rain hardly stopped the month of August,
nickel kettle boiling on the stove all day for tea.
She decided to give in, as a painter might,
and let the shadows offer direction.
She'd follow with a sponge of gold lacquer
to dab the edges.

At least the dusty Buick in the alley was washed
and ready for travel. Sometimes she thought of it as a country
movie marquee, a ticket past the rural drive-in
where stars kissed beyond the hood,
and she drove home to prowl through the warm,
black fields with the cat.

Every now and then she reached in
her dreams and pulled a title out for evening.
Right now it was Baby Elephant in the Choir Stall.
After close-ups of dark red puckers under the Milky Way,
and a summer of Bach weaving through her empty house in the rain,
why not an image that ungainly,
waving its wrinkled nose at the future?

The trick was to read the puzzle laid out
by a liturgical young elephant,
this animal, a first trumpeter of song.
Then came the training, the chaining and poking
at a spirit to make it fall into step,
to make it fall asleep
and keep quiet.
And here she had this elephant whose eyes closed
to nap in her dream.

She stopped in the middle of tea on a gray afternoon.
How had fugues and a clean Buick suggested such travel?
And just imagine how this creature would sound
on a night years from now, full grown in a cathedral.
Echoes of all the long-held misereres.

There was such persistence in this image,
similar to those of a Chinese painter
she once had known. He painted canvas after canvas
of dark train stations in pre-war Berlin—
glass dome of stars,
rails beneath crisscrossing like comets,
and the city's lanternly wobble in a far archway.
Night-sheen drew him, though he knew his paints
bought in China, overtime, would disappear.
Sometimes he even painted with warm tar
filched from a roadgang in his province.

How would it be to live on a bench in one of his depots?
She could wear her favorite yellow scarf and
know with each breath she was fading a bit,
going away.

First published in Mississippi Review