Dragon Ring

Elizabeth Ashe

My great-grandfather, was a Cossack. The normal family story
starts with the Revolution years,
and his strength as the Czar’s Bear. He spent the rest of his life mumbling about how If Only

he wasn’t sent far out on patrol that day, Nicholas and the family would not have fallen.

Before the Revolution
when the Czar first called him My Bear –
he also gave my great-great grandfather
a dragon ring in a box carved like a cloud.
It was a wedding present for his bride,
something so extravagant, but from an extravagant man who loved beautiful things.
The gold dragon was set with Alexandrite eyes
like the sea, a deep sea at a flash of sunset
and ruby breath and claws, just a little, almost invis- ibly red.
The filigree, my mother says, was almost mystic.

This ring was passed down to my mother. When I was four, the ring was stolen.
My mother thinks my step-dad set it up, because that’s the kind of person he was –
Only her things were stolen by a group who said they were workers, and she caught them leaving hurriedly one late afternoon.

She didn’t notice the ring was missing until she packed me up and left him
a few months later. The box was empty.

She flung the ring box out over Sunset Cliffs where the Pacific carves and churns caves under the sandstone and golden poppies. Hoping to draw the power of its ring

back to protect her, even if only
as a flash of eyes, in a lair beneath the cliff.