Lion

It is a hollow affair. You understand. And it has four heads. But this is misleading. Because it has four chests as well and four torsos, and four front legs, which must be hard to understand, since it seems there should be eight, but it has four, and the four front legs are twice the size of a normal leg, and so are the paws, twice the size of normal paws, and the only thing the heads and legs and torsos and chests have in common is the small of the back, one small back held up by a steel post and shared by the four lions, who by this portion of metal, shaped like an inverted bowl, are made into one lion. You see how difficult this is, so forgive my clumsiness. The lion has four heads and he is made of hollowed steel, and I’m sure I could make a song of this if I wanted to, but at the moment I do not feel that cheerful. Hollow, like armor, the lion, like a thing to be worn, not a thing in its own right, except in a museum, of course, where things which are part of a bigger picture are pulled away from that picture and made to stand outside of time, all alone, apart from their given function and the things to which they were born: they stand and stand so that we can stare at them until the mind goes blank, if it were not blank before, which well it might have been. Of hollow steel the lion is made, and his handsome heads, his four rusted heads—the old gold paint now flaking as if the lion had mange or leprosy—oh poor creature—are both hollow and flat on top, as if the crowns of the heads had been cut clean off in an experiment, or a massacre; but they were not, the heads were crownless from birth, fashioned to hold high the slate table top stolen from the mansion that burned. This is true. And they do. The mansion burned, the slate was stolen, and the lion’s four heads holding up the heavy stone table are flat and hollow. But how handsome the faces, bearded like pharoahs, and how beautiful the forelocks, like Elvis curls, and how high-boned and fine the cheeks, and how proud and furious the pulling of these lions below the table top, and above the cement cracked by weeds, and beside the overgrown garden, this pulling and pulling in four different directions, as if the lions were the four winds of the world yoked together, or the four guardians of the four regions—so that if you look at them long enough, look at the lions, pulling so hard, trying to get somewhere, they seem to spin in a wheel, and it is a fiery wheel they spin in, as if the sun itself that spins through the heavens had been cut loose and were doing a wild dance here in this little yard, a mad dance, a sweet disfigured dance that cannot be deciphered, but still delights, as such things on some days delight.