Oddly Evolved in the Gardens of Academia

by

heather momyer

issue 33

march 2 09

Rumor has it that all purple elephants love yellow flowers and savor the

golden pollen that travels up their trunks making them drunk and giddy

from floral bouquets, and I guess that it must be true, as you, my young purple elephant, favor daffodils over my irises; you prefer buttercups to my violets, sunshine roses to my spring sweet lilacs, and I must admit that inverse must then be true as well.  All yellow hippopotami like purple flowers always best.

        I feel that is has become evident that we have grown as the antithesis of the other, but in ways the complement and not negate.  We have grown as large mammals hunkered down in searches for other purple elephants and yellow hippopotami, ready to quickly abandon the colorless amphibious sludge from which we came, where we feel our heavy feet slowly sinking in the mud, always threatening to engulf our bodies.  We have become too massive to learn how to swim through our primordial waters.  We have forgotten what it was like to be the light-footed brown toad climbing up out of the coal heaps of half-abandoned Pennsylvania mining towns.

        So, we trudge away from the land of genesis and move onto the atomic flat plains of scientific reasoning where all that is visible is limited only by the capability of the elephant’s vision, or to the quickly moving water of art and the humanities, discussions of the constant flux of identity whirling in the eddies surrounding the behemoth body of an animal that seems too awkward to be placed in any other environment.  But yet, it is always awkward, because I see no other yellow hippopotami here in my waters and I constantly move farther downstream, and when I look out to the plains where electrons whirl and swirl, defying the very laws of nature that mammals have come to comprehend, I see that you are the only purple elephant, and irises and daffodils grow neither in the currents of the river nor in the openness of the wilderness landscape.

        We have forgotten that space where identity and language and atomic movement can be as simple as living, and the moistened soil that rises around slower waters springs the vines for yellow honeysuckle and purple wisteria and the mountainous forest that covers underground caverns is where violets and buttercups will always grow, always best.