Brendan-Brown, Sean

English

University of Calgary Journal Hosting

Prayer for Vicente You were vigorous, always speaking truth. T h e y — t h e law, corridor and b a d g e — chained your neck to a river stump and laughed as you choked on toxic water, s inking out o f Argentina like a scutded barge. Now, free of all the attachments and turmoils I dr ink glasses o f yellow l i q u i d which dribbles, under pressure from a city tap and stinks of you, poetic amphibian, your brain confined to mud, lips gelatinous like the skins of priests; what exudes is truth, indulgent, s t r a i n e d — the sharp mineral majesty of golden poison-cups. G o d , hear me out: that church, low-roofed, once beautiful with chi ldren singing and the b l i n d man's well-fed gende rat; that holy annex now off-limits, crowded with contraband; that purple cluster of flowers grown through the jeep track by the guardhouse, growing, pushing, wi ld things hopeless i n their colours as the mandates of Nietzsche. Christ, tell your father of that f u g i t i v e — p r o u d , unarmed, arrested with rapid vanity, meeting torture and death unfairly, struggling to the end to continue breathing; tell h i m of the boy soldier Vicente, unable to fire the head-shot, who gave the poet cigarettes unt i l the bleeding stopped then rol led the corpse into a ditch, hitched his long ride home o n a manure truck while generals with dyed hair and foreign whores d ined with cardinals. S E A N B R E N D A N - B R O W N 

Prayer For Vicente

https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel/article/download/33523/27567

Prayer For Vicente

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