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.

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