|
the gryphon
He would
have wanted to know which body he represented. A
boy could not have told you, The moon will be
different then as now. A boy is taught
the moon is a satellite. A boy dresses as a
bear, but secretly he wants to lose himself
among the windbreak. A road map hung on the wood
panels in his bedroom. He slept beneath it, woke
to it. He was called into a small white room
and asked why it was he drew them. Because the
desert rose to meet him each morning. Because
he knew a patch of woods near a turnpike where
he found a buffalo head nickel, a rusting fire
engine. He couldn’t have told you where he met
the gryphon. Perhaps in a book, or a dream, or
a name. Maybe he just loved wings, whatever
could lift him from the ponds near the
battlefield with cattails in his
hand. To imagine a figure so ancient and elegant
while living in brick buildings
without light fixtures makes perfect sense.
There were rats beneath the buildings, not
lions. He couldn’t even remember seeing a bird.
The boy walks to the school carrying colored
paper. His father drives to Newark in the rain,
works in a plant, and after work drinks beer
beneath the bridges overlooking Manhattan. The
boy grows up, keeps a map in the glove box.
He hangs a map of Spain on the wall. In Spain he
found a small bridge, under which a thin river
shuffled Roman stones. Beneath the bridge, light
made waves against the rusting metal, elaborate
webs whose color he cannot name, and he thought,
Surely this is
what my father must have seen.
sean patrick hill,
author of The
Imagined Field (Paper Kite Press,
2010) and Interstitial
(BlazeVOX, 2011), was recently awarded a
Zoland Poetry Fellowship and residency at the
Vermont Studio Center. His reviews of poetry
and interviews appear in Hayden's Ferry Review, Boston Review,
Rain Taxi,
Bookslut,
Guernica,
and Gulf
Coast. Poems appear or are
forthcoming in JERRY, Harpur
Palate, LIT, CutBank,
Drunken Boat,
DIAGRAM,
Spork, and Zoland Poetry. He currently
lives and teaches in Kentucky, and is an MFA
candidate at Warren Wilson College.
|
