Chris Banks

Pages: 1 2 3 4

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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