Rhinoceros

Snow in the early morning, then sleet by dawn,
switching to steady rain by eight. I like to see
the weather flexing its muscles. Now the wind
is picking up from the north, lashing the rain
into a radical slant. There’s not a bird in sight.          
Today is Valentine’s Day, named for a saint
who most likely didn’t exist. Like love itself,
perhaps, here today, gone tomorrow. Earlier
this morning I drove to the florist as cars slid
across the ice as elegantly as Olympic skaters.
Soon I came back with two cyclamens, their heart-           
shaped leaves marking them as a Valentine gift:
purple for my daughter, bright red for my wife.
Nothing else today has such color, although
I see a wide variety of gray. My wife arrived
in this country on Valentine’s Day twenty-three
years ago. Ten months later our daughter was born.
I wish I could say that it has always been easy,
but the good times have offset the bad by maybe
ten to one. And that’s pretty good, right? I mean,
that’s maybe as good as it gets. And if someone
does a little better, I don’t want to hear about it.
At least I’ve never felt regret, while each time
she crosses my line of sight feels like a gift, and,
sure, there are other pleasures, though I’d prefer
not to reveal too much. What are those animals
that live all by themselves and come out only
to have sex? Rhinos, for example. Collectively
they’re called a crash of rhinos, which doesn’t
sound reassuring. So would it surprise anybody
that rhinos are not known for having friends?
But at times I think I should have lived like that,
hunkered down in my rhino-den and feeling sullen
as I sharpened my horn on a rock, but, believe me,
it wouldn’t have meant happiness or even pleasure,
just teeth-clenched endurance. And if I did it,
what would be the point? But I’m lying to myself.
I have no wish to be a rhino. Where does such self-
deception come from? Yet when I see my wife
sitting across the room and it feels like a gift,
part of me thinks I should hurry to my rhino den
and chomp on some moldy grass. Megafauna
is what they are called and odd-toed ungulates.
Can you imagine as a kid telling your Aunt Betty
when she asked about your future, I want to grow up
to become a megafauna? But the real reason I never
told Aunt Betty was cowardice. I lacked the courage
to face her stricken disappointment or lively scorn.
Early rhinos weighed twelve tons, twice the weight
of elephants, and we should be glad they all became
extinct. Even these days in India and Nepal rhinos
kill more people than tigers and leopards combined.
Not only do rhinos feel sullen, they feel obviously
aggrieved. What the baby rhino hoped for and what
it got left it in a permanent bad mood. A two-hour-old
baby rhino I saw once looked like a leather hassock.
It’s a big leap from hassock to odd-toed ungulate.
Why I would tell Aunt Betty I wanted to be a rhino
isn’t clear to me. I mean, it seems like something
at the edge of psychosis. But this morning driving
to the florist and watching the cars skid around,
I saw that being a rhino was like being an SUV
and what I’d been seeking was a sense of safety,
which, when looked at logically, might make sense
but my choice of animal was silly, and it wasn’t just
safety that I wanted but a sense of self-sufficiency,
like being your own Swiss Army knife, but bigger.
But could I tell my wife I had doubts about shared
domesticity on account of my wish to be a SUV,
like telling her I wanted a sex-change, but worse?
And it’s not even true, I don’t want to be a SUV,
but, no matter how much I love her, a nervous voice
still nags in my ear: You’d be better off as a SUV,
or best of all a rhino, one of those twelve-ton ones
nobody would mess with. The root of this desire
is a total mystery to me. I don’t really like rhinos.
I don’t have a collection of rhino figurines or keep
their pictures on my dresser or display them proudly
on T-shirts as people do with dogs, bears and pigs.
Nevertheless the nervous voice tries to convince me
this is wisdom; I mean, not even the nervous voice
likes rhinos, it’s just, to his mind, a best case scenario.
And even if tempted by SUV’s, he prefers rhinos more,
since they can live about fifty years and don’t make
much noise other than stamping their three-toed feet.
All sorts of people treat their foibles with affection,
as they might treat a dim-witted child with affection.
Oh, I always mix ice cream, catsup and beer, they say,
with a laugh that invites you to  laugh along as well.
But you can’t do that if you want to be a rhino. Sorry,
I must stop saying that; I’ve really no wish to be a rhino.
You know how it can happen when your brain knows
one thing and another part of your body thinks it knows
something else, perhaps it’s in the stomach or spleen,
or in one of those glands? Like my urge to be a rhino
is caused by my endocrine glands or exocrine glands,
while my brain tries to keep me on a safer and more
sensible course. But if I were to tell this to my wife
as the reason why I sometimes seem distant or why
I have a fear of being happy, she’d give me the look
people make before they spit. And she’s a scientist,
she speaks mathematics like Finns speak Finnish.
So it would be tough to convince her. Yet what I call
feeling distant or a worry of being happy turns into
the belief that I should hunker down in a rhino den.
I mean, the safer I feel, the more vulnerable I feel,
which is exactly how I feel when I use a chainsaw.
Some things you should never tell another person,
like turning to a stranger in a bar and confessing   
you like to eat cow pies, it’s just a bad idea. Even
if you confessed it to a priest in the confessional,
you’d regret it. Even if he didn’t tell anyone else,
one day you’d catch him looking at you strangely.
A desire to be a rhino in a rhino den is like that,
but I swear I’ve no such wish, it’s just a hankering
caused by a rogue gland, a hankering that makes
every other part of my body shout out, No! No!
But who would believe me?  A fear of being happy,
a wish for an unattainable self-sufficiency, a fear
of vulnerability, which leads to isolation and being
short on trust. You see, I’ve already said too much.
By now it’s nearly dark. The sun sets at five fifteen,
but on a gray day like this it hurries to get a head start
and by four o’clock it’s grown so dark I can’t tell
whether it’s raining or what the wind is doing. Neither
the dog nor cat want to go out. And it’s Valentine’s
Day and I’ve given my wife flowers and chocolates
and told her I loved her and now I’m telling her
that part of me, a very small part, almost a smidgen,
wants to be a rhino hunkered down in a rhino den,
but why that should be the case, I just don’t know.