Inseminating the Elephant

by Lucia Perillo

  in their caveman belt buckles and leather hats.

  Whew. That we found in them a soulfulness, an architecture

  of tempo changes and chord progressions

  left us relieved. Childishly

  we hummed along as the sun got gulped down like a vitamin

  and boats of cheapskates gathered on the bay.

  When the lightning started, it was fearsome and silent

  as usual. We were older, we knew this,

  but the past proved not to be all suicide and motorcycle accidents.

  Here was proof the music had shown some finesse—

  even if it pillaged the discographies of black men from the Delta

  it did so honorably, erotically, meaning

  “that which gathers.” So we held hands and drew near.

  And the flashes lit us, when they lit us, in platinum flames:

  then we saw, behold, below the bleachers,

  a man whose rubber sneaker toe-tips

  punctured the darkness as he spun.

  He lurched and spun and lurched and fell,

  a messenger from the ancient cults

  until his stomach’s contents were strobed ruthlessly

  once they splattered on the tarmac. Sky says: Rise,

  feet say: Heavy. Body would say: Torn in two

  if it weren’t already passed out

  with all the good Samaritans busy remembering

  the words to the tune about the rambling man. Oh

  Bacchus, Dionysus, ye Southern rock stars

  of antiquity: Thank you for shutting the black door

  behind which he vanished, so we could resume

  holding each other, like two swigs of mouthwash.

  Then the brother who was not dead

  played another of our childhood songs.

  Tsunami Museum, Hilo

  Because she comes here just a few hours a week, you are lucky

  to have found her—

  Mrs. Ito, who is ninety-four: you have to bend way down

  and speak loudly in her ear.

  To ask for the story she floats on these words: wreckage and sky,

  the wreckage and sky,

  when she tells how her house lost its moorings at dawn

  to the shoulders of the surf.

  How because she could not swim she clung to a door

  and rode it the night

  of April Fool’s Day, 1946:

  the whole seaward part of town destroyed.

  So the museum sits now in the lee of the headland

  across from the bus station

  where drunks sail to sleep on its wooden benches—

  the sun outside has fried them through.

  Wreckage and sky, the turmoil and the clarity:

  timbers lobbed by the wave-crest

  versus the constant stars. Or the wild hair of the drunks

  versus this morning’s placid bay.

  For sixty years she has sailed on the door

  of her story, and now she is sorry

  she cannot tell it well enough — she left school to work

  in the hotdog plant

  years before the wave. Yes,

  there were others who survived,

  but they were children, so they were quick,

  outsprinting the surf—

  they did not spend the night

  all stretched out on the sea.

  Which was a deeper black than you could ever imagine,

  though what she says is:

  All my friends are dead—

  not the wreckage, just the clarity

  when you get to be so very old—or in the hospital

  with no brains left.

  Only me, she says:

  she’s the one who was saved.

  And then she holds up her index finger, for you

  to throw your life ring on.

  Driving Home from the Conference like a Pill with a Thousand People Inside

  We turned off the highway at Chuckanut Drive

  (everyone told us to turn off at Chuckanut Drive)

  where, when we finally slid from the cedars,

  the ocean smacked us in the face.

  Jane squints down into her steering and talking

  (her voice like the hushing of the wet road)

  about how her mother fled from the house

  (one of the many times he beat her).

  How they wore their pajamas into the store

  after crossing the parking-lot stripes in their slippers—

  see how easy it is to start over

  after the hangers screech.

  In the motel, there’d always be a picture of the sea

  (as if all you needed was the idea of its rocking)—

  you feel your life starting over on Chuckanut Drive

  (is what made Jane remember).

  Our car crept like a grub on the country’s edge,

  there on a cliff above Samish Bay:

  mountains to the north, mountains to the south,

  (& a life equaled)

  the huge unbroken water in between.

  The Garbo Cloth

  Her daughter wrote back to say my friend had died

  (my friend to whom I wrote a letter maybe twice a year).

  From time to time I’d pictured her amid strange foliage

  (and in a Mongol yurt, for she was fond of travel).

  Why not a flock of something darkening the sky, so we would know

  (ah, so-and-so is gone!)?

  To a woman from the city, this might perhaps be pigeons

  (blacking out the sun).

  Or else a human messenger, as once when she was fabric-shopping

  (bolt of green silk furled across her body)

  Garbo passed, and nodded. At Macy’s years ago

  (when I was not a creature in her world).

  Of course she bought the cloth, but never sewed the dress

  (“a massive stroke, and I take comfort in the fact she felt no pain”).

  Logic says we should make omens of our Garbos and our birds

  (but which one bears the message? which one just the mess?).

  From the kayak, I’ve seen pigeons nesting underneath the pier

  (a dim ammoniated stink)

  where one flew into my face. I read this as a sign

  (that rancid smash of feathers)

  but couldn’t fathom what it meant, the bird trapped in the lag time

  (of an oracle’s translation).

  Foolish mind, wanting to obliterate the lag and why—

  (let memory wait to catch up to its sorrow).

  In addition to the rattling of cellophane

  What I remember about the famous writer is how

  he took the English muffin sleeve from a high shelf,

  how he mumbled his apologies

  on finding only one stale white puck. How

  he blew the cornmeal off

  before he forked the halves apart, twisting to loosen them

  the way my mother did.

  How therefore came a little intermission of memory—

  a patch of time he filled by pacing

  in front of the toaster-oven window,

  lacquered and leaded with grease

  like the stained glass of a church.

  How I was looking for wisdom, how he was no talker.

  How he devoted himself instead to buttering,

  palming the muffin-half close to his eye

  while the golden glob vanished

  into the craters.

  How slowly he heaved it with his knife.

  A Pedantry

  Many of the great men — Buddha, Saint Augustine,

  Jefferson, Einstein — had a woman and child

  they needed to ditch. A little prologue

  before the great accomplishments could happen.

  From nothing came this bloody turnip

  umbilicaled to the once-beloved,

  only now she’s transformed like a
Hindu god

  with an animal snout and too many limbs.

  You’d rather board a steamer with chalk dust on your pants

  or sit under a bo tree and be pelted by flaming rocks,

  renounce the flesh

  or ride off on a stallion—

  there is no papoose designed for such purposes,

  plus the baby would have to be sedated.

  Sorry.

  We don’t want the future to fall into the hands of the wrong — ists!

  That’s how civilization came into being

  for us who remained in the doorways of here,

  our companions those kids who became chimney sweeps, car thieves,

  and makers of lace.

  By day we live in the shadows of theories; by night

  the moon holds us in its regard

  when it doesn’t have more important business

  on the back side of the clouds.

  Four Red Zodiacs

  Because I’d drunk a lot of coffee on top of some antibiotics

  strange ideas were already swimming in my brain

  like sharks patrolling their aquarium walls

  when I saw those strange rafts circling in the harbor.

  Gatling was the word that came to mind

  for the machine guns mounted on their turrets,

  but Jim said I was wrong. And also:

  Great, so now the war comes to Palookaville

  while I stood too stymied for a superior thought.

  Eventually we turned back from the window

  to our task to prove ourselves

  not easily deterred:

  loading the truck with bags of garbage

  so we could take them to the dump.

  Styrofoam boxes from the Vietnamese restaurants

  by which we are sustained.

  We came back dirty, so we washed,

  then lay down predictably.

  And it seemed oddly synchronous

  that I’d just been reading Baudelaire,

  who couldn’t stand what sex did to the face. Meanwhile

  a big ship slid into port

  like a capsule sinking in the throat,

  then some jeeps and earthmovers drove aboard.

  And why not say we fucked right through it!—

  an optimist might say that love prevailed.

  But there is another way to look at it:

  as greed, the body taking its cut first

  (although I didn’t look, I never can stand to look).

  Later I thought I saw a frogman in the bay,

  but it could have been a seal.

  I mean a real seal,

  which is to say an animal.

  Then, Infamous Reader, comes your turn to say: But we are all animals.

  Martha

  Nearly all the remaining quarter million passenger pigeons were killed in one day in 1896.

  They named the last one Martha,

  and she died September 1, 1914, in the Cincinnati Zoo,

  she who was once one of so many billions

  the sky went dark for days

  when they flew past.

  Makes me wonder what else could go,

  some multitudinous widget like clouds or leaves

  or the jellyfish ghosting the water in autumn

  or the shore-shards of crushed clams?

  Goodbye kisses:

  once I had so many of you but now I note

  your numbers growing slim—

  yesterday a man stood me up in the sea

  behind the big rock where the sand dollars live.

  And when I said Now we should kiss

  it seemed we’d grown too peculiar

  and I thought: Oh-ho kisses, are you leaving too

  like the man’s hair? Or like

  the taut bellies we once had

  or the menstrual period that was mine alone—

  time flew its coop

  our days did skid

  and now see my commas going too—

  art mimicking life’s mortal nature?

  So I did no hem-haw with the man

  I told him to grab hold of my ears

  since daylight burned

  the tide had begun to apply its suction then

  the shotguns of our lips turned toward

  what was perhaps the last of our wild flock.

  Breaking News

  for Hayden

  They found the missing bride and she is living.

  They found the boys floating on the ocean in their little yellow raft.

  The ornithologists found the extinct woodpecker

  when it flew over their canoe.

  Not everyone is convinced, though.

  One recording of its distinctive knock turned out to be a gunshot.

  A century of Ozark fishermen

  said they saw the bird when they were stranded

  on their hummocks in the swamp.

  Nobody believed them but the catfish in their pails.

  Those boys thought their muscles strong enough to paddle against the squall.

  And the bride only wanted a bus trip west

  before the rest of her life downed her like an olive.

  Sometimes survival strikes us dumb

  with the improbable story of resurrection;

  we see the blossoms smutted on the ground

  turning back into a flowering tree. Next year

  there’ll be new nettle stalks

  to sting your fingers, which you’ll drag

  through the serrated leaves to prove

  the world has not lost the consolation of its old pain.

  For the First Crow with West Nile Virus to Arrive in Our State

  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 manuals of style

  that 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.

  Not Winter

  after reading Anne Carson’s Sappho translation

  How sad it must be in Greece when winter comes,

  like Coney Island but with a less-brutal sea,

  and what is sadder than a hot dog or souvlaki for that matter

  when the last nub of meat slips through the bun

  and the girls cover up their gowns so like translucent grocery sacks

  caught spookily in trees and I think they’re olive trees

  only because I don’t
know much about Greece,

  how do you expect me to know anything

  when the papyri are in such tatters?

  In all we have of Sappho’s poems, the silences

  come rolling forth like bowling balls:

  blank after blank after blank after blank

  [to remind us of what’s missing].

  Then comes a word like Gongyla or Gorgo,

  which sounds like the name of a Japanese movie monster

  instead of a girl too lovely

  to be eating a hot dog made of useless lips.

  But there is no food in Sappho’s poems,

  which makes me wonder about every other missing else,

  who cooked the meat and carted off the chamber pots

  so Sappho could stroll under the olive boughs so unencumbered

  by her body, her reputedly squat wrestler’s body,

  thereby left free to strum her lyre? I am not saying

  it is an easy thing to write a poem that will be remembered

  for three thousand years, but it is a harder thing

  to build a temple out of rocks. A temple

  where the girls will party all-nite

  until their gowns start flying off

  and into that ferocious silence:

  [ ].

  Then comes two words intact—

  I want

  Love Swing

  The new guy bought it as a present for his wife

  (this a story Jim is telling)—

  like a love swing like I think of as a love swing?

  Jim uh-huhs: she’ll ride it Christmas morn.

  So let us stop to praise the new guy’s paunch,

  the dimpling in his wife’s thighs,

  though when I ask if I could ride a love swing

  Jim says, “I’m afraid your love swing days are through.”

  In case of fire, strike chest with hammer

  and wind up all the dogs in the neighborhood,

  while I zen out trying to remember the name of… ah…

  not Leland Stanford but Stanford White:

  architect of Madison Square Garden,

  where the famous velvet swing hung in his tower studio—

  tapestries, sketches, photographs, a hive

  of mammoth work and mammoth pleasure

  all mashed together in one place.

  But it was the swing

  that drove jurors wild at the trial

  where the killer named Thaw got off the hook

  because his young bride Evelyn had ridden it,

  laughing and kicking her dainty feet. And I think:

  Maybe everybody in America has a love swing,

  maybe it’s as common as a jungle gym,

  a secret no one has let me in on

  until now, when it’s too late. And my next thought

  is that I have been all my life a tad repressed,

  I mean I prided myself on having been around the block

  but I never rode a love swing. Okay: