Handing Down A Place
Benjamin Pryor
Ibai means river in Basque
and I could have named him Pigeon
after my favorite headwaters, whose
rocks are penetrable and allow hops
across the cold white lather, where
we climbed a cliff head naked
when he was six and jumped
into the deepest center of a pool
whose frozen rush in summer needled
and took our breath when we surfaced
like crazed dogs and paddled to golden
silt banded along the shore, father and son
not needing to swim in fear anymore,
smooth rock and blasting river, the opal
eye rippling in the fathomless hole.
This is what it means to see as one.
Benjamin Pryor’s work has appeared in The Oxford American, The Southern Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Hunger Magazine, Main Street Rag, The North Carolina Literary Review, and is forthcoming in Pataphysica. Currently he is a network administrator for an educational company and lives in Chapel Hill with his son.