Elephants and Men

Enormous, oh-so delicate intelligencers,
Pacing across the earth
Like peripatetic philosophers,
Rumbling and soughing in the language of the soul...
Did they swim up out of the deep,
These lunar titans,
With testes buried deep in the abdomen
And snorkelling trunk,
And, in the foetus, the nephrostomes of fish?

In Tamil Nadu, an anxious student
Inscribes his every book
With the whorl of Ganesha,
Blessed Remover of Obstacles.