The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog
knows one big thing.
—Archilochus, 680–645 BCE
Well, Archilochus, I guess your lyre
might help me mock, and maybe mourn, this loss—
today I broke the frosted Elvis glass
I bought at Graceland when the symposium
of poets toured the mansion. Before I tossed
the cracked glass and thumb-sized shard away,
I looked at Elvis embossed on the side
seated at his piano, and thought of how
fans honored you for centuries just like him.
One summer in the Paros museum
I studied the frieze on the Totenmahl relief
where you recline on a couch, your lyre
and spear and shield around you to denote
your double life as warrior and poet.
I drank only water from my Elvis glass
keeping it by my bed at night while I read
poetry or history, and sometimes thinking
about Lynda Hull, now dead, who urged me
to buy the glass in the souvenir shop
that April afternoon. The gritty surface
under my cool fingers always conjured
a black dress, a hat, a fringe of red hair.
You, too, Archilochus, if you’d been there
would have bought something to honor a legend,
maybe a coffee mug with a grinning Elvis
or a keychain decorated with a pink guitar,
laughing with the rest of us, for your “I”
jumping out of your new iambic verse
still slashes across the years the way your spear
once flew into the stomach of an enemy,
invective fixed by the new technology
of writing. But here am I, another “I”
complaining about a favorite broken glass.
Shouldn’t I write about nature and beauty?
By God, I hear you laughing at me,
you hedgehog of a poet, ready to roll up
and point your dangerous spines at anyone
who thinks that poetry should praise not blame.
Maura Stanton won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize for Snow on Snow and has published five other books of poetry, a chapbook of prose poems, and three collections of short fiction. She has poems and stories forthcoming in Allium, The Hudson Review, Plume, and Alaska Quarterly Review.
