Hal Sirowitz

Elephant Mystery

My sister swallowed an elephant.
You may ask, ‘How could she have done that?’
For your information, this is a surrealistic poem.
I don’t have to explain anything. I just write
down my dreams. You might be prone to ask,
‘What do you do if you can’t remember your dreams?’
You just make them up. A surrealistic poem
depends upon imagination. A realist
might say, ‘Then it’s not really a dream
if it’s made up?’ But dream experts, like
Carl Jung, called dreaming while awake,
‘Active imagination.’ The surrealist argues
that most of life is made up. The only
two realities are death and taxes.
My sister spit out the elephant.
I’m not forgetting this is a surrealistic poem.
I’m not responsible for the images.
They come from the part of the brain
that is seldom used – the imaginative area.
My sister spit out the tail. Now I’m
becoming logical again. I’m finished with
the tail. I did this part to show that
a surrealistic poem can be totally
logical once you accept the premise.
And you might ponder, ‘What
in God’s name is this guy doing?
Why doesn’t he just write
his surrealistic poem and be
done with it?’ Because a good
surrealistic poem never goes away.
The images stay with you for a long time,
longer than it takes to swallow an elephant
and spit it out, minus the tail.

Eyes On Thomas Merton

I heard the gospel song, ‘Keep
Your Eyes on the Sparrow,’ so
that’s what I did. But I wasn’t
sure it was a sparrow. I must
have missed that lecture on
identifying small birds in
bird watching class. It could
have been a warbler. But
I was following the gist of the idea –
keeping my eyes on what
flew out of sight, what was
not traceable to man. I was
left imagining where it
went after my eyes could
see no further. ‘Nowhere’
was too vast to imagine.
Since I could no longer
fathom the unknown,
I thought about the books
I had read, especially one about
a writer’s spiritual visit
to Thomas Merton. It
wasn’t that spiritual, because
he was upset that Merton
had a phone. He thought
you can’t be contemplative
with a phone. But he never
mentioned seeing Merton
answering the phone. Maybe
Merton used it as a test
to see how often he could
hang up on civilization. The point
is you can’t judge someone
by whether he has a phone or not.