Sectarian bicycles

no thank you to the Sistine Chapel—to the
instructions written on a curved banana
cabdriver prays with us in Arabic we are nowhere
near Antwerp or sunshine or the fatally blue sea
we are nowhere near the Sistine Chapel which
used to be ground-zero for a certain kind of
plenitude I see it now and again through the T.V.
eye I see what a certain square footage of coinage
can accomplish which is why I am hightailing
it upcountry where the pine and spruce meet the
sky’s blue-green beard of stars one or two of us
note the coldness the grayness and the shyness of
the wind the sound of death from above in the
form of something that will most likely have to be
redacted and yet we keep talking about the past—
the ghost of Christmas when you left me to wander
somewhere between fawn and faun I thought
I’d never see forest again much less the inside of
a Dutch apartment with its steep stairway and winch
for winding up pianos and Bach-type harpsichords
the color of eyetooth and ermine this is where
you come to give me knackwurst and the skeletons
of swallowtail butterflies this is where we compose
the symphony of extra silence for the funerals
of the October deserters there are spies here who
have to balance the spirit of reconnaissance against
their desire to write one line of sacred poetry
per day for the rest of their lives there are sick
cats to remind us of the afterlife and a box of
sour wine that asks to be spared like the blood of
Christ was spared in the presence of those Vatican
detectives—there are cowherds who can never
go home again and hospital grounds for rewilding
when the soldier-priests come to realize there
has never been such a thing as sectarian bicycles

Bryan D. Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023) His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon Annual, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Glacier, Boulevard, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.