Darwin calls it universal,

himself witness to an Indian elephant

weeping, captured and bound in Ceylon,

stock still, tears the size of pisco grapes

the only indication of her suffering. Grief,

he wrote after speaking to a mother

about her dying son, was an orchestra

of contracting facial muscles: pleated furrows, eyes pinched,

abrupt arch of her brows, a relief

sculpture, levo—to rise from the surface.

How easily I think of the woman

and her sickly son, Darwin, the mewling elephant,

remembering me with you:

ten years too young to marry, to own anything

worth owning, a farm

that needed a new foundation and roof. I should have left

it to the fields to swallow whole; I didn’t

know it at the time, but you took

a dozen rolls of film

our first summer, documenting my slow progress

wedging rotten siding from the façade with a claw hammer,

running blood-colored rust from the pipes, patching

the chimney’s fissures with mortar. Bats, you thought,

entered through the eyelets and circled pell-mell

above our bed while we slept, feasting on a fog of mosquitoes,

moths drawn to the warm light of the lampshade. And me, five years away

from temperance, sobriety,

muscled into your photo with its smear of backdrop leaves, bottled bourbon

cocooned in glass, your camera trained on the furnace stack,

my gaunt face:

he orbicular, corrugators, and pyramidal muscles

quaked

with regret, which Darwin wrote is indistinguishable from sorrow.