Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

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...

You Love,  move aside,  don’t try to walk  over this grief  barefooted. I’ve laughed and cried  too many times  at the clock,  a promiscuous condition of Lazarus.  Oh sweet genital grief— You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe — there is a dead man  on my bed and  it looks like …