‘At Pegasus’
— Nix Thérèse
I admit that the retrogrades threw me for a loop the past week because many things in my life that seemed to be set shifted unexpectedly. Yet as I felt the ground quaking under me, the one thing that never wavered was my sense of longing for a certain person. I discovered ‘At Pegasus’ when I went looking for anything to match or quench this feeling.
We’re lead into a comparison of the men and myth: “they’re like those crazy women / who tore Orpheus / when he refused to sing.” This is a stunning comparison because Orpheus in Ovid is still singing of his grief over Eurydice when he’s torn limb from limb. The women’s jealousy is so strong that they’d rather destroy the man they desire than hear him speak of anyone else. We enter the poem in this intensity, we’re told to tread lightly where people have come to indulge. No one wants to hear of the speaker’s sorrow or past loves; maybe this is why he turns stunningly inward.
Pegasus always opens a spring upon landing, so what if this club is not the horse-god himself, but the imprint and the singular outpouring? Even from the opening, Hayes is calling us to peel back the layers of myth and wade deeper. The speaker rejects a dance while later admitting that he has “held a boy on his back before.” We spin out of this confession to discover the easy intimacy of the speaker & his friend, and his hesitance to physically address those on the floor. He sees a young man slipping his thumb inside of the mouth of an older man; he’s “not that far away,” but his gaze is the only touch he’s allowed himself. While they are not obviously present in the poem, I looked for his hands in this moment. I could feel the itch in them while he held himself in suspension. As this scene flitted around him, I envied the spill that never reaches his mouth.