by Susan Blackwell Ramsey

I didn’t love him. He was sweet,
teasing letters all winter long.
Flirtation is a fragile art.
Some loss is casual, some cuts deep.
Horns don’t fall off, antlers do,
a tusk means something had to die.

He brought me back an ivory mask
three inches high, with spiral horns,
almond eyes, a pointed chin.
He was very proud he knew
how to recognize a fake,
how to tell bone from ivory.
All he had to do was take
his lighter out, for bone will burn.
What’s true survives a feeble flame,

something I had yet to learn.
As my mother puzzled how
to string it from a cord it slipped
and snapped one horn off, a clean break,
nothing that she couldn’t glue.
And while the epoxy set
it slipped, and the other snapped off, too.
She felt terrible. I did not
mind very much, which was my clue.

I’m sure he wouldn’t buy it now.
Regret saves nothing. Elephants
are matriarchal, mourn their dead.
Their great slow hearts weigh fifty pounds.
And when I hold this in my hand
I miss my mother, not that man.

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Susan Blackwell Ramsey's work has appeared, among other places, in The Southern Review, 32 Poems, Smartish Pace, and Best American Poetry; her book, A Mind Like This, won the Prairie Schooner Poetry Book Prize. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which actually does exist.