Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones

by Lucia Perillo

  the legs the illusion of movement —

  & I don’t understand: how the feet can lift

  when the legs appear to have no meat in them

  at all. Their carcasses

  littered the park where I worked,

  where the birds flew into power lines

  that sliced across the marshes.

  The legs took only a day in the sun

  before becoming dry enough

  to be set out in the nature center,

  in a box where children stuck their hands

  before they looked — a game

  about what we imagine from forms that go unseen.

  But before too long the legs were banished,

  after a woman complained that her son

  had been tricked into touching a dead thing

  & could not be consoled for weeks.

  2.

  Now the era wants us working

  in order to improve ourselves:

  forget Coleridge wandering the upland

  stoned out of his head, forget him

  & his years in the spare bedroom

  at the surgeon Gillman’s house

  where Gillman doled the Black Drop out

  to every day’s white page.

  The Black Drop, cottage industry of widows:

  opium dissolved in quince fruit juice —

  & is it wrong to lament its passing

  along with extinct words like quince fruit juice?

  But the snowy egret’s not extinct, no matter

  how dead it sounds that it should be.

  For that you can thank the functional era

  for having no patience with ornament:

  so women give up fancy hats

  & the birds return to the wayside marsh,

  where they dot the green like clots of foam

  bobbing among the empty bottles.

  Once when she was really flying

  my girlfriend bought a velvet hat,

  a black pillbox with one white plume

  shooting straight up from the forehead.

  This she wore with rubber boots

  to bang on my door at ten p.m.,

  my friend plotched on cough syrup,

  her mind wandering the upland.

  Now that she’s dried out,

  she fears for her liver; sometimes

  (pressing the phone to it) she’ll ask,

  long-distance, what I think (she thinks

  the hat got left on a Greyhound bus).

  I think, Yeah, but remember the fun

  we had walking the stiff plumes of our hair

  through fresh snow glowing lilac in the moonlight?

  But she says no; those nights were tragic

  & she can’t remember anything.

  3.

  Those years my friend gave to Robitussin

  I spent chasing after men on bikes,

  the loud machines they wore as ornaments

  between their legs. They all had the long

  black-clad legs of the egret —

  spread, slightly bent, from the low-slung seat

  & I would have liked to have been one myself

  but part of me wanted to stay in the bed,

  my spine a white curl replicating

  the S-curves of the canyon road,

  my plumage perhaps a camisole

  with one torn strap. But the choice was either

  him or her, looker or looked-at,

  subject or object, you could not be both

  & me being pigeon-toed & flighty, unable

  to hold anything upright with my bad legs…

  well, it figures I’d come to land here

  where the cedars drip into Ellis Cove

  & the long-legged birds stand stock-still

  on the stumps: that’s how they disguise themselves.

  As I’m likewise disguised in a porkpie hat,

  binoculars my only ornament besides the clear drop

  clinging to the bulb of my nose-tip.

  Above the cove, the shoreline road

  hugs the curl of the embankment

  & the guys (who would be geezers now)

  rumble along it on their Honda Gold Wings.

  4.

  Audubon’s most famous painting

  I must have looked at a hundred times

  before I noticed the tiny hunter

  approaching from across the marsh.

  Meanwhile the bird keeps the black drop of its eye

  steady on us, terrifyingly steady,

  as if he accepts this one long moment —

  Perfect Beauty — for whatever comes next.

  Isn’t that why the guys all lit out

  on their bikes: to stop time

  while they were still in their best feathers?

  Shaggy at the head and neck,

  they let the whole world enter them —

  the speed, the green, the trash-strewn marsh —

  looker & looked-at blurred into one thing.

  One time when I asked the bad-boy poet

  to read his poem about the egret, which I love,

  it was not his refusal that angered me

  so much as the way that he’d aged

  so much better than I had. Now that he’s dead

  sometimes I’ll spot a beauty like his

  riding crosstown on the stuttering bus,

  like Coleridge on the deck of the Speedwell,

  sailing toward Malta in his sealskin coat,

  though in this case of course it’s a black leather jacket,

  one of those portable black caves of sleep.

  Look at him dozing, hunched into his collar.

  Look at him hunched into his wrecked good looks.

  If he looks out the window, I bet what he’ll notice

  is the sky’s bearing down now, as if it might snow.

  The crushed cans singing in the ditches

  & the trash bags pinned to the cyclone fence.

  But he won’t see the bird

  in its grand bright whiteness —

  hunkered like a foam-clot, luffing in the wind.

  5.

  Getting back, at last, to the salt marsh where I worked:

  in the California summers, botulism

  rampaged through the ponds.

  It made the birds’ necks fold

  & their long legs double up

  as they dragged their shaggy haunches

  through the shoreline’s stinking dust.

  The snowy egret I found

  was long past hope — whenever

  I found a sick bird on the trail

  I was supposed to take it back to the office

  where one of the men would break its neck

  to keep the disease from spreading.

  All right, then. That’s what I’d do.

  I carried the egret clamped under my arm,

  because I’d read that given a chance

  it might spear me in the eye

  with its black beak. Strange

  how it knew the eyeball was soft

  & crucial to its being seen, & knew

  how the viewer produces the viewed

  in a miracle of transference.

  Black drop inside of yellow drop,

  black drop inside of bluish-gray:

  we studied each other while the trapped head twitched.

  By the time I got back

  all the men had gone home, so I killed the bird

  the way they did, by taking its head

  in the cave of my hand & making my thumb

  & forefinger a collar around its neck.

  Then I spun the body until it went limp —

  this was easier than I expected.

  The late sun was broadcasting

  gold light on the marsh, & I did not think of Coleridge

  & what the dead bird meant to him.

  Instead, in that moment, I felt like a man,

  or how I imagined a man might feel.
<
br />   A delusion, of course, & soon the sun closed shop,

  & then all I felt was sadness

  for what the world had made of me.

  after Larry Levis

  On the High Suicide Rate of Dentists

  It’s no surprise, when you think about what the teeth

  are the ramparts of: slippery slope

  leading to the gullet. Little jagged-edged ivory

  makers of sameness, the Bolsheviks of the dining room:

  take the lobster tail or the prime rib,

  put in your mouth and chew them awhile

  and all class distinctions — whether deep-fried or drowning in butter —

  quickly become moot. But any actual tears

  are hard drops to explain, especially coming from someone

  like the one who played “novelty music”

  when he chopped the fillings out of me.

  Guitarzan. How lighthearted he seemed

  as he chimed along with Jane’s falsetto yodeling.

  And though you might think gastroenterologists

  would wear the crown of their despairs,

  at least they witness how bygones can be bygones

  and how the burden can be released. Versus this

  perpetual going-in, which is always the scariest part

  of the story: Give up hope, all ye who enter here.

  Even the radishes are doomed, cut so painstakingly into roses.

  So maybe part of their sadness comes from the sushi

  assembled to look like the stained glass at Chartres.

  Or the crown roast whose bones wear those paperboy caps

  while ever so eager the knife goes in.

  Freshwater and Salt

  When we were young girls and swam naked in Turkey Lake

  we were like animals: our legs were thickly furred.

  We took the trees’ rustling for a sign of their watching.

  Even the limestone drooled from its mouth cracks.

  But then I got real: it was only lake ledges, dripping —

  rainwater, sweat of moss, and dew.

  Maybe a man hid behind a birch’s pale skin

  and I saw him, once. The rest, my ego running wild.

  Still, it’s the roundabout way that I’m taking to the island

  that is Indian land, where I lie down without my shirt.

  This is years from the lake, and the water is salt

  when a rockslide clatters off the bluff.

  Make the clatter a sign of the watchers come forward —

  in the calm that comes after, I can hear their feet.

  But the trees have long since surrendered their trench coats

  and gone back to being simple trees.

  First thought, I’ve grown old; second thought is the cops,

  but I keep my eyes closed to stall their skirmish

  over me. Time clicks like their footsteps as they come close —

  until a musty breath whelms down my face.

  Now hold it there, freeze-frame, while I look up

  at the sun’s corona on a mule deer’s chin.

  Chewing some fox grass, regarding me only

  because on this wild shore I am strange.

  In the Confessional Mode, with a Borrowed Movie Trope

  …and then there is the idea of another life

  of which this outward life is only an expression,

  the way the bag floating round in the alley

  traces out the shape of wind

  but is not wind. In a fleabag hotel

  in Worcester, Mass., a man is dying,

  muscles stiff, their ropes pulled taut,

  his voice somewhere between a honk and whisper.

  But float down through the years, many years,

  and it’s us, meaning me and the man

  as a boy upstairs in the house

  where I’ve finagled my deflowering.

  Maybe finagled. Hard to say if it’s working.

  It reminds me of trying to cram a washrag

  down a bottle neck — you twist and twist

  to make it reach, but it does not,

  and in the end the inside of me

  was not wiped clean. Oh I was once

  in such a hurry. The job had to be done

  before the pot roast was, his stepmother

  thumping the ceiling under us: Whatever

  you’re doing, you better get out

  of your sister’s room. But her voice

  carried more of the wasp’s irritation

  than the hornet’s true rage, so we forged on —

  while our jury of trusty busty Barbies

  perched on their toes, their gowns iridescent,

  a sword of gray light coming through the curtain crack

  and knighting me where I contorted

  on the rug. And it’s clear to me still,

  what I wanted back then; namely, my old life

  cut up into shreds so I could get on

  with my next. But the boy was only

  halfway hard, no knife-edge there,

  though the rest of him looked as if it were bronze,

  with muscles rumpling his dark-gold skin.

  Meaning this is a story about beauty after all.

  And when the roast was ready, I slipped outside,

  where November dusk was already sifting down

  into the ballrooms underneath the trees.

  It was time to go home to my own dinner,

  the ziti, the meatballs, Star Trek on TV,

  but how could I sit there, familiar among them,

  now that I was this completely different thing?

  Sweat was my coat as I flew from his house

  while the brakes of my ten-speed sang like geese.

  But now it’s his voice that resembles a honk

  in a room where the empty amber vials

  rattle underneath his narrow bed. Meaning

  he’s trying hard to take himself out.

  And while I have as yet no theory

  to unlock the secret forces of the earth, still

  I think there’s a reason why the boy and I,

  when we grew up, both got stuck

  with the same disease. Meaning the stiffness,

  the spasms, the concrete legs —

  oh I was once in such a hurry. Now

  my thighs are purple from all the drugs

  I’m shooting in, & I don’t even want to know

  how the boy looks racked and wrecked.

  Sometimes in the midst of making love

  that kind of body will come floating in,

  but quickly I’ll nudge it away in favor of

  the airbrushed visions. But not him,

  the young him, the brass plate of whose belly

  would be more lovely than I could bear,

  though in chaster moments I will visit

  that alcove of me where his torso is struck

  by all the dark-gold light that still slants in.

  Oh we are blown, we are bags,

  we are moved by such elegant chaos.

  Call it god. Only because it is an expletive that fits.

  His body, his beauty, all fucked up now.

  God. Then the air cuts out, and then we drop.

  Fubar

  for Paul Guest

  For starters, scratch the woman weeping over her dead cat —

  sorry, but pet death barely puts the needle in the red zone.

  And forget about getting brownie points

  for any heartbreak mediated by the jukebox.

  See the leaves falling: isn’t this the trees’ way of telling us to just buck up?

  Oh they are right: their damage is so much greater than our damage.

  I mean, none of my body parts have actually dropped off.

  And when the moon is fat and handsome, I know we should be grateful

  that its face is only metaphor; it has no teeth to chew us out.

  In fact, the meadow isn’t s
pattered with the tatters of our guts.

  But in last night’s hypnagogic dreamscape where I went

  to collect some data. Where I was just getting into the swing of things

  tranquillity-wise. Then this kid came rolling through the moonlight

  in a bed with lots of Rube Goldberg traction rigging.

  And it was a kid like you, some kid with a broken neck.

  And maybe beauty is medicine quivering on the spoon

  but surely you have noticed — the calf painted on the famous old Greek urn

  is headed to the slaughter. And don’t get me started

  on the wildflowers or they will lead me to the killer bees.

  And that big ol’ moon will lead to a cross section of the spinal cord.

  And the trees to their leaves, all smushed in the gutter.

  And the gutter to the cat squashed flat as a hotcake.

  And the hotcake to the grits, and the grits to the South,

  where the meadows were once battlefields.

  Where a full moon only meant a better chance of being shot.

  But come on, the sun is rising, I’ll put a bandage on my head,

  and we’ll be like those guys at the end of the movie —

  you take this crutch made from a stick.

  For you the South is a mess, what with its cinders and its smoldering.

  And lookee, lookee here at me: I’m playing the piccolo.

  Bulletin from Somewhere up the Creek

  Luckily, it’s shallow enough that I can pole my rubber boat —

  don’t ask what happened to the paddle. Anywhere is lovely

  if you look hard enough: the scum on the surface

  becomes a lace of tiny flowers.

  In the space between cedars, a half-moon slides

  across a sky colored like the inside of a clam.

  Two terns slice it with their sharp beaks,

  gape-mouthed and wheeling and screaming like cats.

  See, nature is angry, I said to myself: Nature

  is just an ice pick with wings. Then a weasel or something

  poked its head through the muck, looked around for a while

  before submerging again. And not even bumping

  the ketchup squeeze bottle seemed to disturb it,