Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones

by Lucia Perillo

  For a long time you lay tipped on your side like a bicycle

  but now your pedaling has stopped. Already

  the mosquitoes have chugged their blisterful of blood

  and flown on. Time moves forward,

  no cause to weep, I keep reminding myself of this:

  the body will accrue its symptoms. And the handbooks,

  which warn us not to use the absolutes, are wrong:

  the body will always accrue its symptoms.

  But shouldn’t there also be some hatchlings within view:

  sufficient birth to countervail the death?

  At least a zero on the bottom line:

  I’m not asking for black integers,

  just for nature not to drive our balance into the dirt.

  What should we utter over the broken glass that marks your grave?

  The bird books give us mating calls but not too many death songs.

  And whereas the Jews have their Kaddish and the Tibetans

  have their strident prayers, all I’m impelled to do is sweet-talk

  the barricades of heaven. Where you my vector

  soar already, a sore thumb among the clouds.

  Still I can see in the denuded maple one of last year’s nests

  waiting to be filled again, a ragged mass of sticks.

  Soon the splintered shells will fill it

  as your new geeks claim the sky — any burgling

  of bloodstreams starts when something yolky breaks.

  And I write this as if language could give restitution for the breakage

  or make you lift your head from its quilt of wayside trash.

  Or retract the mosquito’s proboscis, but that’s language again,

  whose five-dollar words not even can unmake you.

  Altered Beast

  You were a man and I used to be a woman

  before we first put our quarters in

  the game at the gas station, whose snack-chip display

  wore a film of oil and soot

  beside which you turned into a green gargoyle and then

  a flying purple lynx —

  whereas I could not get the hang of the joystick

  and remained as I began

  while you kicked my jaw and chopped my spine,

  a beating I loved because it meant you were rising

  fast through the levels — and the weak glom on

  via defeat, which is better than nothing —

  insert sound effects here: blip blat ching ching,

  and when they stopped, your claws gripped the naked

  -looking pink lizard that I was,

  blood-striped and ragged, as if being a trophy

  were the one reward the vanquished get —

  which is why, walking home through the curbside sludge,

  when you held my hand with your arm outstretched

  as if you were holding a dripping scalp or head,

  I hummed with joy to be your spoils.

  On the Chehalis River

  All day long the sun is busy, going up and going down,

  and the moon is busy, swinging the lasso of its gravity.

  And the clouds are busy, metamorphing as they skid —

  the vultures are busy, circling in their kettle.

  And the river is busy filling up my britches

  as I sit meditating in the shallows until my legs go numb.

  Upstream I saw salmon arching half into the air:

  glossy slabs of muscle I first thought were seals.

  They roiled in a deeper pocket of the river,

  snagged in a drift net on Indian land.

  Trying to leap free before relenting to the net

  with a whack of final protest from the battered tail.

  They’ll be clubbed, I know, when the net’s hauled up

  but if there were no net they’d die anyway when they breed.

  You wonder how it feels to them: their ardent drive upstream.

  What message is delivered when the eggs release.

  A heron sums a theory with one crude croak; the swallows

  write page after page of cursive in the air. My own offering

  is woozy because when their bodies breached the surface

  the sun lit them with a flash that left me blind.

  Inseminating the Elephant

  The zoologists who came from Germany

  wore bicycle helmets and protective rubber suits.

  So as not to be soiled by substances

  that alchemize to produce laughter in the human species,

  how does that work biochemically is a question

  whose answer I have not found yet. But these are men

  whose language requires difficult conjugations under any circumstance:

  first, there’s the matter of the enema, which ought to come

  as no surprise. Because what the news brings us

  is often wheelbarrows of dung — suffering,

  with photographs. And so long as there is suffering,

  there should be also baby elephants — especially this messy,

  headlamp-lit calling-forth. The problem lies

  in deciding which side to side with: it is natural

  to choose the giant rectal thermometer

  over the twisted human form,

  but is there something cowardly in that comic swerve?

  Hurry an elephant

  to carry the bundle of my pains,

  another with shiny clamps and calipers

  and the anodyne of laughter. So there, now I’ve alluded

  to my body that grows ever more inert — better not overdo

  lest you get scared, the sorrowing world

  is way too big. How the zoologists start

  is by facing the mirror of her flanks,

  that foreboding luscious place where the gray hide

  gives way to a zeroing-in of skin as vulnerable as an orchid.

  Which is the place to enter, provided you are brave,

  brave enough to insert your laser-guided camera

  to avoid the two false openings of her “vestibule,”

  much like the way of entering death, of giving birth to death,

  calling it forth as described in the Tibetan Book.

  And are you brave enough to side with laughter

  if I face my purplish, raw reflection

  and attempt the difficult entry of that chamber where

  the seed-pearl of my farce and equally opalescent sorrow

  lie waiting?

  For the Mad Cow in Tenino

  I don’t know where you rank in my list of killers:

  my viral load, my sociopaths, my inattention

  on the interstate, where I crane my head after the hawk

  and the windshield splatters

  into diamonds. Not just thinking about the hawk,

  or even merely watching it, I always have to be it for a minute,

  just as my mind enters the murderers

  for one long flash before it stumbles out.

  From your postmortem, you held us fast

  while a man said It’s enough as his lungs filled

  after being stabbed here near the playground,

  before they milled his limbs with power tools

  and scattered him beyond retrieval. Too late

  to recall your brain, and the fatty white part of your spine,

  already delivered to the rendering plant

  and melted down into the slurry.

  That night is gone and cannot be reassembled

  despite my re-imagining the car

  with a man dying in its trunk, a car otherwise like any other,

  as we could not verify your affliction

  for days after you fell. Which left the land in chaos

  except for Scatter Creek’s flowing past,

  wending without hurry through the coastal range

  before it empties rain and blood into Willapa Bay.

  from


  On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

  (2012)

  No death for you. You are involved.

  WELDON KEES

  The Second Slaughter

  Achilles slays the man who slew his friend, pierces the corpse

  behind the heels and drags it

  behind his chariot like the cans that trail

  a bride and groom. Then he lays out

  a banquet for his men, oxen and goats

  and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat

  until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.

  The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief —

  in the morning more animals must be killed

  for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds

  no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;

  not even heaving four stallions on the pyre

  can lift the ballast of his sorrow.

  And here I turn my back on the epic hero — the one who slits

  the throats of his friend’s dogs,

  killing what the loved one loved

  to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent

  by vanishing from my concern

  after he throws the dogs onto the fire.

  The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.

  When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep

  until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially

  which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets

  and tails like peacocks, covered in tar

  weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows

  at the rim of the marsh. But once

  I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals

  my first lament. So now I guard

  my inhumanity like the jackal

  who appears behind the army base at dusk,

  come there for scraps with his head lowered

  in a posture that looks like appeasement

  though it is not.

  Again, the Body

  I have become what I have always been and it has taken a lifetime, all of my own

  life, to reach this point where it is as if I know finally that I am alive and that I

  am here, right now.

  TOBIAS SCHNEEBAUM, KEEP THE RIVER ON YOUR RIGHT

  When you spend many hours alone in a room

  you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself —

  this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal

  but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us

  do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,

  from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bit

  a thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum,

  who walked four days into the jungle

  and stayed for the kindness of the tribe —

  who would have thought that cannibals would be so tender?

  This could be any life: the vegetation is thick

  and when there is an opening, you follow

  down its tunnel until one night you find yourself

  walking as on any night, though of a sudden your beloved

  friends are using their stone blades

  to split the skulls of other men. Gore everywhere,

  though the chunk I ate was bland;

  it was only when I chewed too far and bled

  that the taste turned satisfyingly salty.

  How difficult to be in a body,

  how easy to be repelled by it,

  eating one-sixth of the human heart.

  Afterward, the hunters rested

  their heads on one another’s thighs

  while the moon shone on the river

  for the time it took to cross the narrow sky

  making its gash through the trees…

  To the Field of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall

  Half costume jewel, half parasite, you stood

  swaying to the music of cash registers in the distance

  while a helicopter chewed the linings

  of the clouds above the clear-cuts.

  And I forgave the pollen count

  while cabbage moths teased up my hair

  before your flowers fell apart when they

  turned into seeds. How resigned you were

  to your oblivion, unlistening to the cumuli

  as they swept past. And soon those gusts

  will mill you, when the backhoe comes

  to dredge your roots, but that is not

  what most impends, as the chopper descends

  to the hospital roof so that somebody’s heart

  can be massaged back into its old habits.

  Mine went a little haywire

  at the crest of the road, on whose other side

  you lay in blossom.

  As if your purpose were to defibrillate me

  with a thousand electrodes,

  one volt each.

  Domestic

  Here the coyote lives in shadows between houses,

  feeds by running west to raid the trash behind the store

  where they sell food that comes in cans

  yesterday expired. Picture it

  perching on the dumpster, a corrugated

  sheet of metal welded to the straight, its haunch

  accruing the imprint of the edge until it pounces,

  skittering on the cans. It has tried

  to gnaw them open and broken all its teeth.

  Bald-flanked, rheumy-eyed, sniffing the wheels

  of our big plastic trash carts but too pigeon-

  chested to knock them down, scat full of eggshells

  from the compost pile. “I am like that, starved,

  with dreams of rutting in a culvert’s narrow light — ”

  we mumble our affinities as we vacate into sleep.

  Because we occupy the wrong animal — don’t you too feel it?

  Haven’t you stood in the driveway, utterly confused?

  Maybe you were taking out the garbage, twisting

  your robe into a noose-knot at your throat, when you stopped

  fighting the urge to howl, and howled —

  and did it bring relief, my friend, however self-deceiving?

  I Could Name Some Names

  of those who have drifted through thus far of their allotted

  fifty or seventy or ninety years on Earth

  with no disasters happening,

  whatever had to be given up was given up —

  the food at the rehab facility was better than you would expect

  and the children turned out more or less okay;

  sure there were some shaky years

  but no one’s living in the basement anymore

  with a divot in his head, that’s where the shrapnel landed/or

  don’t look at her stump. It is easy

  to feel possessed of a soul that’s better schooled

  than the fluffy cloud inside people who have never known suchlike

  events by which our darlings

  are unfavorably remade. And the self

  is the darling’s darling

  (I = darling2). Every day

  I meditate against my envy

  aimed at those who drift inside the bubble of no-trouble,

  — what is the percentage? 20% of us? 8%? zero?

  Maybe the ex-president with his nubile daughters,

  vigorous old parents, and clean colonoscopy. Grrrr.

  Remember to breathe. Breathe in suffering,

  breathe out blessings say the ancient dharma texts.

  Still I beg to file this one complaint

  that some are mountain-biking through the scrublands

  while she is here at Ralph’s Thriftway,

  running her thumb over a peach’s bruise,

  her leg a steel rod

  in a miniskirt, to make sure I see.

  Cold S
nap, November

  That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less

  alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the

  course of a single life would lead us to believe.

  JOHN BERGER, THE SENSE OF SIGHT

  In 2006, in Ohio, Joseph Clark raised his head in the middle of his

  execution to say, “It’s not working.”

  The salmon corpses clog the creek without sufficient room to spin:

  see, even the fish want to kill themselves this time of year

  the therapist jokes. Her remedy

  is to record three gratitudes a day —

  so let the fish count for one, make two the glaucous gulls

  who pluck the eyes before they fill

  with the cloudy juice of vanishing.

  But don’t these monuments to there-ness

  feel a little ostentatious? Not just the gratitudes,

  but also what they used to call a hardware store

  where you hike for hours underneath the ether

  between the ceiling and the dropped-down lighting tubes,

  muttering I need a lock-washer for my lawnmower shroud —

  huh? You know

  you should feel like Walt Whitman, celebrating

  everything, but instead you feel like Pope Julius II

  commanding Michelangelo to carve forty statues for his tomb.

  When even one giant marble Moses feels like a bit too much.

  This year made it almost to December without a frost to deflate the dahlias

  and though I stared for hours at the psychedelia of their petals,