[34] Orality, Bryan Price

and some suffer extravagantly
wind whistling unhealthily
through them their organs
their hours spent
with a God inside beseeching
their mistakes concerning
time and money and
everything that comes after…
decisions gone disastrously wrong
as if the air and the ground
gently moving beneath feet
the rising sun and gravity itself had
conspired against them and their
capacity to hope for an
untroubled existence
there is an old song about it
as old as the Earth’s core
a mainly revolutionary force
now rising from tide pools
from the water’s edge emanating
like privacy from
the back pages of plans
for a simple machine—
a penumbra wafting like smoke
smelling of an old Volkswagen’s
interior—salty dry coming
apart in your hands
traveling with you sans zygote
to Moraga or Orinda where you
live and the hills are like stars
on the lens painted so intuitively
into a memory that
it narrates itself
eclipses all other genres of
remembrance: myths
memorials tall tales origin
stories immigrant songs
exile orality