Landscape with Urban Elephants

                                    No one knows exactly how many elephants
                                    there are in Bangkok.
                                                                         — PBS

Up from the dumps and the red-hollows
where water wells from the bottle-speckled mud,

up from the scrub and cracked palms, up from the can-fires
into the dazzle and slither of traffic muscling

around these boulders of hide and waddle,
up from a distant bliss of tree-fern and orchid,

from mahogany and kapok, the elephants come
to the city.   Big-shouldered and wattled.

Their slow bop strut up the boulevards,
a repertoire of rolled eights kept by the metronome

of bottle-brush tails syncopated by reflecting tape
patched across their asses.  Painting elephants,

dancing elephants, peanut-eating, banana-slinging
elephants, half-smiles and great, gray Walt Whitman eyes

above the bike-lights that swing from their trunks. 
Traffic swerves around their oil-slick piles of shit.  

Beneath it all, a squall of noise, flutter of trunks,
they sing: platter-foot, big toe, skin of wet burlap. 

They sing: It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
Deep into the night alight with sodium

their back-beat rumbles travel for miles, pacing
a high hat rhythm the tuk-tuks keep beneath the Skytrain.

They totter off to sleep it off beneath the milk-colored
dawn as their tails keep their own rough time.