Parasailing
Year 29
Requiem
________________________________________________________________________
in Puebla we watched
drugged tigers being driven
endlessly around the Zócalo
Haitian guitar music kept us going
I kept a journal on graph paper
that tells me the Beijing Olympics
were on in the hotel bar
after you fell asleep I drank
beer with ice and thought about
the medical instrument museum
there was no parasailing like
in the Denis Johnson
story about stealing copper wire
in my father’s house (where
I lived for many years)
he had hung a picture of
himself in the hallway high
above the Gulf of California—
what a lonely business I would
think to myself as lonely as
fighting forest fires or when
the sun hides behind the past
to withdraw its light forever
________________________________________________________________________
such things have been worn away
tried and true things like shoes
skin and posture it is the posthuman
rain even buildings crease
and fold—quiver in the wind
the acceleration of age on the faces
of the apple trees can be detected
by the tv eye nothing granted
by either gods or moons except
for sleep where even dreams have
become grainy from the laughter
of decay there is no alcohol
left to rub on the skin grafts only
petroglyphs prefiguring the aesthetic
of lists indices of pure derangement—
rules laws threats from above
along the lines of we have come
for your children and your
children’s horses and every other
fragment of bone not nailed down
such is the logic of late history
________________________________________________________________________
in the spring of 1970 two died as infants—
a requiem for control
brothers whose tiny hairs were woven into
a ring the likes of which were once set
upon the waves of the sea—two cosmically
pessimistic arias lifting the meaning of
chance (of grief) up—up towards myth
the spring of 1970 was of the same
maelstrom or arc the same sense of vertigo
this republic of ashes spat out or spat
upon fed on like played out horses
eye drawn to calamities with no promise
of recurrence or spot on a map famous
for its healing waters no safe place to draw
honey from the rock just the most sublime
forms of harmonious violence—
a hundred or thousand kinds of sadism
meant to draw the mouth to its master in a
fit of parasitic rage—an imaginary return to
the wound naturalized into an origin story of
innocence—a childlike remembrance at
the heart of the commonweal—a sucking
on the past for its proximity to
empty time when no one thought yet
to eat fire or defile the memory of a dead
language when no one thought yet of
the war metaphor not the forever war
but its prelude and coda separated by an
affectionate hand or hard kiss on the wound
seduced by the promise of sweetness and
its illusion of future importance—never
to venture across the street or ride a bus
alone into the valley of common recklessness
into the whole panoply of catastrophic
decisions and folds of prickly relations
expelled past the border sketched with a
fingernail around the surface of expectation
the horizon of understanding pushed
beyond the outermost contour
lifting civil war ballads from the thicket of
lost time and embedding them in snow
where no snow had ever landed
listening through the cold crack in the cement
wall where their portraits once hung—
listening for the hum or whistle of
disaster come calling down across the sky
we have written requiems for much less
elegies to flowers and bushes of flowers
with less blood on the leaves—
the body has been loaded upon again
and again and it only sucks further and
further into the mud like the lamb or lotus
given as a gift on the final day of reclamation
only to return upon the earth in the form
of a magpie milky from eating the flower
of decay—the body is a piano now rising
out of the sand and grass played poorly
by the wind but its sound or noise is that
of our nature scorning itself—the body
rings and groans played now with hammers
and tongs no mystic chords of memory or
sympathetic vibrations—the body unfurls like
after a long fire—an arm and then a hand a
finger and then a flake of skin or hair spoliated
by the melancholy progress of the wind
Bryan Price is the author of the forthcoming collection, A Plea for Secular Gods (What Books Press, 2023). His poetry has appeared in Posit, DMQ Review, Rhino Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.
