poem: Here's Hippogriff

a quasi-tautogram for quasi-kicks!

“As a way of denoting impossibility or incongruence, Virgil spoke of ‘mating horses with Gryphons.’ Four hundred years later, Servius (one of Virgil’s commentators) declared Gryphons to be eagles from the mid-point of their bodies upward and lions from the midpoint down … Servius added that these animals hate horses … In time, the locution iungentur iam grypes equis or ‘cross Gryphons with horses,” became a common saying; in the early sixteenth century, Ludovico Ariosto recalled the phrase, and invented the Hippogriff.”
- Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings

Here’s Hippogriff

Heretical hypothesis, hard to hold, 
honest paradox, wholly hopeless: 
that by husbandry or hypnosis
one could herd heavenly hellcats 
down to these homey haystacks,
where honeysuckle and hibiscus hints
hover through the hostelry’s hush,
to host high harriers in heat
here in this humble paddock 
to hump the horny stud.

Heretical hypothesis, hardly held, 
holy moly, heterodox and how:
that by horrible harmony
two have hewn a hinny hither
from howling gryphon grin and 
hard host’s hoisted horseshoe ringer 
shifty heaves and whispers whinnied,
harbingers of the half-horse-hater
half-horse filly hatched,
handsome incongruity.

Heretical hypothesis, hardly hoped,
hoo-boy howdy hark, here he is:
by hook by crook we have
hazelnut hooves hemlock-quick,
hunting hare to hole, hound to ground,
hyphenated heritage heralding
heterogenous homologies:
horse-hip, hawk-lip,
lion-heart, kitten-hiss
impossibility happening,
impossible, yet here, here impossibly yet.