Allegory of the Hippo

Such a variety of hippies that an untutored observer
might be blinded by love, might be blinded by the bright
life of every different one. Some drew out their long hair
and lived in it, nesting. Some drew from the soil
something oily and locomotive. Some were dizzy
and making ever larger circles. It was chaos, it was
dangerous for children who didn't have the bright soul flower
to guide them inward. Rumors spread
of their ferverent purple tubors, of their disdain
for flight school, optical systems, and privacy.
According to local peevishmen, their total body weight
exceeded all measure and was mostly bionic.
What kind of hippies were these? Once,
hippies lived in the great river in the Savannah.
It was chaos, it was dangerous for children, until each day dimmed
and hair and dirty hands grew pacified by the moon.
The banks were calm then. Each night they made a stew
of river water and roots, and the children
lined up for their share, satisfied that wildness
like all else will pass from the world congealed,
as it were, outside of the purveyor's vision of poverty.
The littlest rustling raised an ill-timed awareness of
a perfectly baked sweet potato, left behind on the banks to
lure the untrussed in a gumbo. Along the banks of the great
green, greasy Limpopo river where a gnash was whiting,
where all comers would be servered, the hippies paged
through waterlogged volumes, reliving their mythic transmigration,
their strange happenstance. Before there were safety muglets,
there were whited sepulchres and a long, slow, hotly disputed
foreign border leading them home
to the sickle moon, where hippies are shadow rabbits
reaching painfully with servered hands, reaching paper-thin
for a small bit of tinder that is just like them. This process of likeness--
long fibers on a mesh screen-first bathed, then colored and taughtened
with five metal combs. The community was striated. Those
pacified by the moon remained so. The rest--stringy,
starlight, sepia, and acid--became photographs
and an era ended.

by Wendy Burk, Anna Fulford, and Bonnie Jean Michalski