November flung from summer’s flywheel,
the plants on the porch gone leggy and brown, and moldy
from the damp. Don’t stick your head in a plastic bag
the spiders say, you think I’m being whimsical but I say
they say it in these webs besilvered with rain, two
hanging side by side from the railing, another two
strung perpendicular, one from the dying potted peony,
one from the dying potted dahlia. ART SAVES LIVES
says the bumper on my neighbor’s truck, and though
I always thought that was just an example of liberal
arts professors’ taking liberties, it could refer to this
minor rehabilitation of the season. So for its service,
let’s dedicate the next fifty-two seconds to art,
how all things make it, both arachnid ribosomes and rain.
Think of a cloud, think of a geode, think of the mold
on the plate in the fridge. This strange assemblage
made by weather and an arthropod: what fates conspired,
whose mind was at work, or did it result from a force
from before the first bang? Spiders themselves
don’t appear to ask, and don’t think
that’s because they lack the intellectual chops — just imagine
what concentration of mind it would take
to wait unmoving in your own fiber installation,
hours spent with your legs so artfully outsplayed?
Women in Black
I’m talking about the ones who trawled the thoroughfare
in dark garments whose long hems
were coming loose — had you seen them
or did you dream them? For sure
you whispered their mythology in the dirt rut
underneath the monkey bars: the husbands
who had lain down on the tracks, or the kids
with too much skull above their brows —
being jilted at the courthouse,
blackmailed by ghosts, afflictions caused
by criminals who found them when the men
were working late. Hair snarled and wild
or pinned up too severely, necks bent
so they could scrutinize the minutiae
(a metal thimble or a garter clip)
washed up by the curb. Things lasted
longer, rotted quicker, the materials
were better, the technology was worse.
But were they real, or only forms
to fear becoming, gossip of the yellow bus,
feral wisdom, mother-lore, stepdaughters of Carl Jung?
Who made them wander, was it you,
from Yonkers to Sleepy Hollow, gathering
bouquets of weeds and resting on public benches
whose slats cried out for paint? Their legs
splintered, grief-thinned, lorn — their hands
(preternaturally large) you feared: that one
might clap itself to you in passing,
that she might begin to speak.
The Rape of Blanche DuBois
What did I know about art? I had seen a few foreign movies, that was it.
When I drove from my childhood home, I reached the Cuyahoga River and was disappointed to find it not burning because I knew a song about its burning. When I came to the Platte River I was satisfied because the song I knew was about a bum along its bank, and I did see that.
I thought a river burning would be art. A bum along a river could be art, with the right sort of lighting, but the man I saw was not correctly lit.
Nearby however was a warehouse, where a local troupe was putting on A Streetcar Named Desire. The word streetcar made me think of hats, and stockings that hooked onto garter belts.
Plus, desire was a word with its own little jet-plane that could whisk you off to Paris.
So I parked by a drainpipe running down the wall where the poster had been pasted. It showed a woman being eaten by a shadow.
Not a gray one but a black.
Inside, the warehouse was cold despite the rumble of the heater, and as soon as she stepped onto the stage, you knew that Blanche was damaged. I remember wanting to tell her that we didn’t have to do this, enact her humiliation. And my simultaneous wanting her to do exactly that.
Break into little pieces, like the bits that are fed to dogs. Ah! I thought, so this is Art. This chewing, my cheeks full of Blanche.
And when he was finally alone with her, in this production Stanley tore off his silk pajamas. Turned away from me, but still: I remember all the muscles in the actor’s rump.
A muscled rump aroused me even as it horrified.
Then the warehouse went black for the scene change, a few moments of dark during which my arousal deflated. You may not believe me when I say the air expelled by its deflation was sufficient to eject me — from one life into another, into my authentic life, in those black moments that contained both the ardor and the horror, and the wonder at their having been simultaneously created.
When the lights came up again, the men in the white coats hauled her off, The End. And as we clapped, everyone sheepishly stole a glance or two, to check the status of everyone else’s arousal. Asking which life are you in? your old life or your new?
The new one that was the product of your willingness to be manipulated, and therefore of your gullibility,
or the old one that is childish, or at least naive.
What I Know
The enemy is a place over there
somewhere, it’s easy to get confused
now that the countries have been renamed
and their boundaries redrawn—
in fact it may be over, I am not sure,
the war’s been (or had been) waging
so long that I’d forgotten about it;
I am embarrassed to admit my memory
is no longer what it once was. I don’t
want to make excuses for myself, but
there also used to be a lot more hubbub
on the streets that would remind you,
people either kissing choreographically
or chanting singsongs learned in high school
at the pep rallies, the words slightly
altered. Who understands
what they are saying? — Sorry, but I do not hear
so well since while it rages
(raged) I seem to have become
an old woman whose television still
has an antenna whose only news is snow.
Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones
1.
It starts with a dead animal: whenever she finds one
when walking the dogs up in the hills,
Jane puts the carcass in a cage on the roof
in order to bring up the bone-curls and -fractals.
Otherwise she’d have to dig
slantwise through the manglement; it’s best
to leave that to the professionals, the sun
and the maggots, the distant star and the grub inside,
best to put on some music. Best not to listen
for any decibels of little mandibles.
2.
Such an old old problem, what to do with the meat,
you would think by now we could just go poof.
At the industrial park, the crematorium’s metal walls
are lined with Sheetrock to give the illusion
they will last. Sofa in the viewing room, curtains
on the window on whose other side the human corpse
rides through unfinished space, a slow conveyor
to the oven’s mouth. Stay as long as you want but be
forewarned: grief will interrupt when the curtain’s closed
while someone chec
ks the progress of the flames.
3.
Sometimes the Oglala left their dead in trees
to make it easier either (a) for the soul to revert to birdstate
or (b) for the wolves to be defeated. Women’s work:
painting the body with vermilion, wrapping it
in a buffalo skin, flesh-side out. Lastly
a bright red blanket renders the scene more picturesque
while the women lament wild and weird.
If he be a brave, nest with him a few buffalo heads
which time has rendered inoffensive; if he be a chief
slay his favorite pony and lay it underneath
4.
The body’s scaffold possesses such a stringent whiteness
you can easily feel aggrieved at how it’s defiled
by the slackening form.
Well, the bones may have the beauty but the meat
the better story. As in: see how someone
cut off my left breast!
Versus their sterile silence. When Hamlet asks the bones
whether he should kill himself, they refuse to render an opinion,
a song that’s lured even children to sing
for five hundred years without minding what it means.
5.
You cannot know when they are finished — no, you just call
it quits
depending on the whiteness you hope to arrive at,
how much stain you’ll put up with
or whether you value these relics simply
for the majestic architecture of mammalian innerstructure
uncannily inputted by evolution’s overmaster,
how often you know you’ll look from your work to the still
some-percentage-flesh adhering to the bone, your eyes
shifting between it and the clock measuring its desiccation.
6.
But first you have to find an old toothbrush
—or failing, demote one still in use —
to scrub off the gristle that clings to the cracks
and rubbery clods that hang by a thread
before boiling them down to a stink: half-cloying,
half-sweet, every drape in the house
forever infected, even far from the bones,
with the scent of the putrid distilled from the earth,
making your fibers all mortally fragrant
with the power and glory, forever, amen.
7.
Back on the roof, the creatures march
in a synchronized procession — first blowflies and flesh flies,
then carrion beetles. The flies are so shiny
yet their young make you shiver,
waggling out of the meat as it’s eaten
by these grubs who are eaten by carrion beetles.
Then the Hymenoptera wasps lay their eggs in the beetles
and also in the larvae of some of the flies,
where they grow inside the meat of the grubs
who are themselves the meat of the carrion beetles.
8.
And why the bones, not the heart, since so much is made
of that bloody mitten? It would have to float in a jar
full of poisonous murk that it casts its webs through.
And this is not the body of old anatomy books
whose drawings and colors, dotted lines, little numbers
corresponding to a column of names, all suggest
great logic and beauty, part of which surely must remain
even after the last calamity. But all this
would molder in the wide open air, where only the bones can sing.
And of course the teeth, the bones’ little knives, unsheathed.
9.
Every heart sings a song that’s incomplete
said Plato, until another heart whispers back.
He forgot PS: the song might not be sweet.
Plus, hearts might be what this song likes to eat:
chomp chomp. Yum yum. Its teeth could be black
with rot and you might not want to hear their incomplete
singing even if it’s a song — you might not be so desperate,
maybe you find enough fulfillment in the back
catalogue of your own songs, however incomplete.
Or maybe you find completed songs too goddamned sweet.
10.
The bones will stand next to books by philosophers
and books by poets. Because you might need relief
from all that thinking, might need a pelvis for its holes
to see the sky through. You are not so different
from a coyote or a cougar; maybe you’d have been one
if your mother wore another name. And what but meat
would a cougar read? — better empty the shelves,
fill them with bones. Because the books hold in
what the bones spell out: it won’t be long
before your beauty will have all the time in the world.
Yellow Claw
For weeks a backhoe has been working
where the shore drops into the bay: it claws
then lifts a yellow clawful
of rubble. Other times
the claw’s being used as a sledge.
Inside the cab, we already know, there’s a man,
his orange shirt visible
a long way off. The cab swings in circles
but the man never dizzies. We know this
because we never see the claw spazzing out.
How strange a translation is the world
of the mind behind the world!
The sky already darkening,
the man’s belly growls, his big fat belly,
and the future he spreads with the claw’s rusty teeth,
every hillock and divot, is really mashed potatoes
and gravy, the day’s fixation, as he shapes the land,
tamps it in. Someday a bone will be broken here
in the bad dip, layer within the layer
someday to be sifted
and sifted again, though they slip through the mesh.
Photons, neutrinos, the governing waves —
mashed potatoes and gravy:
ever since the doctor forbade it
how he craves the salt.
Day-Moon
Driving the car, walking the dog…
cresting the hill. When suddenly
you catch sight of the day-moon: why
does it come with almost a jolt of pain?
You mean the pain inflicted by its beauty?
No, I mean the pain
caused by its having been up for hours,
and though you’d noticed, you had not seen.
Blaring at you from a sky
the blue of a fast car of a bygone day —
you have so far to go in your perceptual awakening
and the day-moon is the meter of your failings.
And if you’d seen, would you still feel
that soft and slightly sick spot in your stomach
whenever you stoop to self-reflection: now
you wouldn’t stoop, being perceptually awakened
though not boastful, no never boastful.
Meanwhile the day-moon circles the globe like Superman,
hauling the seas on his white shoulders
flying half a mile a second,
taking care of business
but also as calm as the Virgin Mary.
See her face up there?
People used to say that it was made of cheese.
Such silent cheese. Such busy cheese.
About the Author
Lucia Perillo’s sixth book of poems, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon, 2012), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award. Her other publications include a book of stories, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain (Norton, 2012), and
one of essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing (Trinity University Press, 2009). Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon, 2009) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Also by Lucia Perillo
Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories
On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths
Inseminating the Elephant
I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature
Luck Is Luck
The Oldest Map with the Name America: New and Selected Poems
The Body Mutinies
Dangerous Life
Acknowledgments
“Yellow Claw” was reprinted in Pushcart Prize XL: The Best of the Small Presses.
Some of these poems previously appeared in The American Poetry Review, Jung Journal, The New England Review, The New Yorker, Orion, and World Literature Today.
“*Speckled and Silver” appeared in The Book.
Copyright 2016 by Lucia Perillo
All rights reserved
Cover art: Digital photo by Jean Clottes, panel from Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave
ISBN: 978-1-55659-473-1
eISBN: 978-1-61932-150-2
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