Photographing disasters
Already seen
Swimming in a River, 1956
Reading Susan Sontag's diaries
I am ready to speak begin first with the length
we can have less something small like an
epilogue appended to the end about what it
meant to absorb so many televangelists in the
seventies (depending on your patience for
digressions) I guess there is nothing that cannot
hurt us the prayer goes up with the plane not
secular or addressed to something as thinly-
veiled as the universe—God grant me time very
simple like a line drawing of wrists just like that
I fell asleep holding a rosary purpled with
blood Pearblossom Highway was littered
with fish when the wind took his ashes into
the ruins we were having a very frank
conversation in the shadow of the water-tank
and then went inside its belly to hear our voices
strung up together and echoing out of the rot…
then jumped barefoot like birds from the womb
I have been thinking of writing something
puzzling over a bizarre theme or set of
themes put down maybe into a story about
suicide I wrote around 2001 or 2 returning to
I guess is the right way to say it I thought I
heard you come into the house but it must
have been the apparition of a noise something
uncanny like a premonition am I slipping
off into a bad place the past dispersed into
atoms with no chance of miraculous return
or resurrection seeing from miles away on
the clearest of clear days the bodies of wild
swimmers who are us left adrift but comforted
by warm water (an act of desperation one
summer in Lake Sonoma or somewhere
off the coast of Hawaii) I closed my eyes
and saw my father come out of the bathroom
as I am apt to do sometimes with my belt
undone walking sloppily and then standing
in front of the television with hands on hips
it all began to make sense—this is about
pure subjectivity or the arc of living as a
single curve of unremitting grief punctured
by the smallest recurrences seen from a
mirror or maybe in a movie within a movie
I may as well stop writing after this
after going online to hear it’s call
I thought of my mother’s song
and then my aunt’s not as beautiful
but like three swimmers swimming
or intricately contrapuntal music
their mother not running because
where is there to sing to—
just languishing in the water like
a utopian idea that ends in decay
Reading Susan Sontag's diaries
I turn to my birthday
or the day closest to my birthday
(August 15, 1976)
she writes—
what does it mean for time to go faster
for it to pass more slowly
Brodsky says there are two subjects:
time and language.
I see on page 128 the word [Bataille]
in brackets remember
a warm day lying
ignorant and naked on water or
on air or on a bed rapt
listening
to Rebecca tell me the story of the eye…
this moment in time is my
hand-embroidered
found photograph
Bryan D. Price‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Posit, and others. He lives and teaches in Southern California.
