{"id":46,"date":"2011-05-12T16:00:05","date_gmt":"2011-05-12T16:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sporkpress.com\/poetry\/?p=46"},"modified":"2011-05-12T16:00:05","modified_gmt":"2011-05-12T16:00:05","slug":"hibernacle-by-sean-patrick-hill-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/2011\/05\/12\/hibernacle-by-sean-patrick-hill-2\/","title":{"rendered":"“Hibernacle” by Sean Patrick Hill"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hibernacle<\/strong><\/i><\/p>\n

Pieces of myself I left in the west
\nI cannot recover<\/p>\n

save if I were to travel there without my clothing
\nhands open and palms the color of old snow
\nmy hair and beard strung
\nknotted, cold<\/p>\n

Such as a petroglyph on a slab of basalt
\noff the highway in a stand
\nof larch woods,
\nbut you who could have taken me there again are gone<\/p>\n

and I can\u2019t recall its figuration…<\/p>\n

You gave me some things
\nI was thinking about, yesterday<\/p>\n

the cedar flute you bought me
\nthe drum
\nand most importantly
\na cardboard box of black bear bones, the skull intact
\none yellow canine<\/p>\n

We slept in the tamarack
\nthat summer
\nwhen we walked out under the full moon to the cemetery
\nthat stood at the edge of a valley of tailings
\nthe dredge
\na floating gold machine
\nsettling in its pond, a piece of historical junk<\/p>\n

like piles of rusted cans
\nlead soldered
\nthat lay along the desert road
\nabove the river
\nwe had volunteered to clean<\/p>\n

and then I remember<\/p>\n

camping on that road with you
\nsand lilies
\nan overturned car shot full of holes
\nvehicle no one could afford
\nto remove<\/p>\n

You were with me
\nwhen I kept that bear on the bookshelf
\nwhen you found the owl feather
\nat the tarn\u2019s edge<\/p>\n

when we saw the black bear in the road
\njust after
\nthe semi hit it,
\nand you\u2019ll remember how I put my hands to it:
\nhead, heart<\/p>\n

Picking huckleberries we left
\na few for the dead<\/p>\n

As for the skull
\nI hid it in a hollow of lava on an island
\nin the river
\nwith a wing laid over it<\/p>\n

which is what I mean about pieces<\/p>\n

though some I kept with me:<\/p>\n

the drum in a closet
\nthe flute, unoiled, cracked a bit, but still sings
\nstill tied with leather strips and
\na few beads
\nthat hold that owl barb
\nin place<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure what I imagine myself doing<\/p>\n

going down to the river
\nuncovering the hole
\nfinding the bones intact as they are in my mind<\/p>\n

historical trash<\/p>\n

but the yurt in the trees where we slept
\nI wanted to own something like that
\nwanted to walk down the road in the same moonlight
\npast the graveyard<\/p>\n

past the crane at the end of the meadow<\/p>\n

past the hillside of elephant head orchids<\/p>\n

to the spring
\ngushing from the pipe under the road
\ncold water
\npouring from a fault in the rock face<\/p>\n

You kept something of the summer too:
\nthe tools
\nfrom the abandoned barn
\nyellow cotton dress I bought you
\na photograph of me playing that flute actually
\nbeneath a cedar<\/p>\n

finding the headless owl
\non the shoulder
\nme picking it up by the wings and carrying it
\ninto the aspens<\/p>\n

me clipping its wings<\/p>\n

me burying the things I was along a pressure ridge
\nfacing the mountains
\nand the setting sun<\/p>\n

maybe even for whatever reason some slim memory
\nof the car
\nparked on a dirt road
\nnear a dam
\nsaying, here is the day he left me<\/p>\n

here is the day I tore the hair from my head<\/p>\n

here is the day I regret having ever
\ngiven him my mouth<\/p>\n

given him my simple quilts<\/p>\n

given him my bones to hide<\/p>\n

Of course we are constantly breaking ourselves
\nbreaking some useless trail
\nover snow
\nin the direction of some jay in the peak of a larch
\ncrying thief, thief, thief<\/i><\/p>\n

The river is always leaving something behind
\nalways drying up
\nin its canyon
\nwhich makes those blotted petroglyphs seem
\nall the more imperative
\natavistic
\nand sad
\nand vague as a full moon snagged in rabbitbrush<\/p>\n

full moon on the tailings
\nthe sheeted gold
\nno one found<\/p>\n

but one thing more:
\nthe wolf moon we saw over the desert in winter
\nlying on the hood of your car<\/p>\n

whatever it was
\ncoyotes were saying<\/p>\n

and the owl caught in the headlights an instant
\nlater flew into my mouth<\/p>\n

I heard it singing in the cracked chimney
\nof my throat<\/p>\n

regarding a pile of rusted cans deep enough to suggest that
\nsomeone was not alone<\/p>\n

that
\nsomeone loved someone
\nin this desert once<\/p>\n

——<\/p>\n

Sean Patrick Hill<\/strong> is the author of The Imagined Field<\/i> (Paper Kite Press, 2010) and Interstitial<\/i> (BlazeVOX, 2011). He has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, where he was the recipient of the Zoland Poetry Fellowship, and Montana Artists Refuge and Fishtrap. His reviews of poetry and interviews appear in Rain Taxi<\/i>, Bookslut<\/i>, Guernica<\/i>, Gulf Coast<\/i>, and Redactions<\/i>. Poems currently appear in MiPOesias<\/i>, Unsaid Magazine<\/i>, LIT<\/i>, CutBank<\/i>, Drunken Boat<\/i>, and are forthcoming in DIAGRAM<\/i> and Zoland Poetry<\/i>. He currently lives and teaches in Kentucky, and has been accepted into the Warren Wilson College MFA program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hibernacle Pieces of myself I left in the west I cannot recover save if I were to travel there without my clothing hands open and palms the color of old snow my hair and beard strung knotted, cold Such as a petroglyph on a slab of basalt off the highway in a stand of larch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-things"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}