Parnassus ii - A collaboration between Henry L. Shifrin and Sergio A. Ortiz

Parnassus  ii

                 collaboration between Henry L. Shifrin and Sergio A. Ortiz

A bit down mountain, shadowed by an overhanging
cliff, I watch a cataract run like whiskey
down a dry throat of rusted rock
and remember every time I reveled
in diving down
as far down as the dive would take
me, the spume that wakes
a fall’s path, rising above
me, the exhaust of my leaving,
now the skin of my childhood
as I stand mid-mountain.

The day you left

Parnassus,

I went into the mud

and broke out howling.

The tempting

tender racemes

of my skin

crumbled

like an invitation

to dust

and its tomb,

full of funeral

bouquets, tore

and shagged nature’s

perverse angels.

At the abyss

of their mangrove

I ate

their carnivorous

flowers

mistaking them

for the hush

of placenta,

then threw myself

off Pegasus

to step down from that muscled
back, to eye the sweeping shadow
of wings that once raised
me to shade cars and streets


as if I were a leaf batted
by the wind, an echo of the embryonic
waves I continue to sail,
it's the swing of my gait.


I'm grounded in the certainty
my steps contain reason.

There is, there must be,

a sidereal hole for reason

where we lose all grief

and invent new ways

of decadence,

a new today

(not of this world)

in the city.