As If a Dark Cloud

had funneled into the meeting room starting in one corner, no, excuse me, starting from the fireplace, so it must have come sliding down the chimney very slowly over many seasons. No, wrong again, the thing didn’t seem like a cloud except for an ability to sidestep, and its grayness – if it had a color, which it did not. Two of us, relative newbies, felt prodded this way and that as if by sharp tusks, as if we were held to blame for not seeing the obvious: all along there’d been an elephant. Which thanks to us would need to recover.