Thamos, King of Egypt

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 1998 by Frey, Raman

When young, she sang with her hands,

a musical dance of gesticulating burden

meant to emancipate her foggy parents,

designed to capture whispers of children

and free the song of Mozart's trumpeting elephant

before it escaped the hold of her unformed breasts.

And from the breathy swell of her infant breasts, she pulled in a melodious plea, her hands

as if to save his dying young elephant,

Mozart's simple broken calf of burden,

from the tearing claws of children

far too free to mind their tired parents.

Within the gray minds of such broken parents,

she found the sanctity, nestling breasts

cradle of her own voice among other children

whose fragile and muddy musical hands

sculpted the hillocks into burdens,

as stones above the graves of toiled elephants.

It had been the aria of Mozart's elephant

Italian by birth, from African parents,

that had pierced her mentor's sonorous burden

worked his tragedy within her unformed breasts,

trunk with gentle encouragement, guiding his hands

to the ink which birthed his malformed children.

She ate among, played among, sung among children

who'd not heard of Mozart or his elephant,

dancing without music on their hands,

rhyming against the rhythm of sleep-walking parents,

themselves dancing with full inarticulate breasts

hoping to cure their insomniac burdens.

But the breath of such singing burdens,

the price of musically muted children,

was removal of Mozart's unripe breast,

the return to Africa of his elephant,

the end of the aria for sleeping parents

in the empty cradle of their own hands.

In her young song, the hands had always been a burden,

the parents had become their children's muting drug, and

the elephant's warm breasts had sung beautifully Mozart's unwritten

A graduate of Bard College, Raman Frey recently left his graduate studies at the University of Virginia to work in an art gallery in lower Manhattan. He is currently at work on two novels: one set in ninth- to twelfth-century India, the other in contemporary America. Poetry, however, still represents the bulk of his writing.