Chris Banks
The Griffon
Unfathomed for centuries, it sleeps
at the bottom of Lake Michigan,
the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes,
after mysteriously vanishing on
its maiden voyage in 1679
with its six-man skeleton crew
and a valuable freight of furs,
so we are forced to improvise a myth
around this grail of shipwrecks,
an antiquarian’s water-logged dream,
imagining its wooden spars
splintering in the lake’s grave-yard,
squeezed by black bellows,
its wet hafts, mud-struck beams
battered by limestone, shale,
sandstone, halite, gypsum—its hull
revised, deranged, unmade,
until it is no longer a lost ship,
but a tangle of rotting planks,
the wreckage of a forgotten age
treasure hunters trawl for like thieves
in long veils of lime-silt water,
as if something both permanent
and real could be salvaged by
a human desire pure enough
to haul what is left of its origins
all the way up to the surface.
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