Iceberg And Finger

The Rajahs were grand. They had elephants bedecked
in fabulous jewels unknown to the western world

in the crosshairs of their bomber turrets.

The elephants with the biggest earrings proved
the easiest targets, as you might expect, considering.

Not so much a form of flyby vivisection

these were mercy maimings decreed by the all holiest
of the airline pilot school graduates. In fact each Raj

had at least one of his own favored beasts

on the barge. Some divvied up their dead like soccer
players exchanging jerseys after a heated match.

The carcasses with the fewest wounds

were regarded as most desirable as they required
less of the taxidermists time which could run into

considerable money. Not that

anyone was counting. At the heart of the sport
was the camaraderie and a sense of being a part

of something utterly conscienceless.

If an outsider, say a journalist, were allowed
to ride in the cockpit on a sortie, mercy was rare.

The land is an interest, they thought,

and the happiness of one occasion might produce
years of enjoyable misery and other forms of mass

entertainment. Once an animal lover

was fed to a flock of angry heron. She begged to be
allowed to reason with the birds but was laughed off

the tarmac and into a feeding receptacle.

It is prophesied of he with the most junk on his shoulder
that the beasts of the plains and the air function as his

natural armor. So there. The hunting

he finds to be only so so, but the codices detailing the old
hunters and their heroic odes move him to holler like nothing.

What is there left to do now? Now

that the pilots have all been trained and the Rajahs amused
within the limits of the limitless exchange of fun and death?

From the secretarial pool a pinch

of poverty is ordered with the olives and umbrellas on the side
and whatever dad wants down in the vault with the bullet

and skull fragments. The elephant

does not forgive, but can only hold a grudge so long as
all that business about never forgetting was a cleverly written

ad campaign for straighter shooting.

Beneath the control room curtain a pair of enormous gray
feet can be glimpsed along with the base of a circus

pedestal, brightly painted in primary colors.