Inseminating the Elephant

by Lucia Perillo

  I’ve bought a costume or two at the department store

  that also sells chopped meat and pineapples

  where you hide the impractical straps and struts

  between gardening gloves and a ream of typing paper

  as they roll along the checkout’s conveyor belt

  where the bra gets dinged with grease.

  But nothing requiring tools, nothing with such

  ramifications: the kids pouncing on their bunk beds

  while you’re hammering away, I mean hanging it up

  so you can kick a paper parasol like the one that Stanford White

  hung from the ceiling: fiddle dee dee.

  What about the giant hooks?

  and Jim says you get two decoy ferns

  in silk or plastic, so as not to get dirt on the carpet

  and because you don’t want to hang your love swing by the window

  where a true living plant could grow.

  The new guy bought it at the fantasy emporium

  down by Pike Market, choosing the swing

  over the hand-stitched ribbon underwear

  sold in the boutique next door,

  which cost a week’s wages. Jim held out his arms

  to indicate the way she’ll hold the ropes—

  a posture that made me think of Jesus,

  forgive me for saying. But I’m so far gone

  I can say anything: Hello Mister Death,

  let’s run this bar code through.

  Ouch—

  that love swing sets you back more than a hundred bucks,

  but hey it’s cheaper than the ribbons

  and will give you years of sailing back and forth,

  hanging from nothing but graveyard fog.

  Mounting instructions are included

  though they be written in Japanese,

  and it even comes in a discreet black shopping bag

  to match your — whatever you call it—

  your robe your gown.

  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.

  Motorola

  Silver moth whose wings flap before landing on the ear—

  you stir the air with voices

  and then a cloud swirls on the jet stream,

  causing a typhoon a world away.

  I am not happy about having to become a cell phone person,

  even though I see the other cell phone people walking

  with their necks bent so the sun can reach that lovely place below their ears.

  I feel superior, listening to the juncos’ aggravations

  with you squirreled in a pocket on my breast

  where you beep your ultimatums. That you have a molten look

  makes me think that you could seep

  into my body, so I’d contain multitudes

  like Walt Whitman, all my friends alphabetized

  along with the pain clinic, all ruled by that prim mistress

  who asks for the codes and is so firm in her denials,

  firm in her goodbye. I’d renounce her altogether

  did my bones not have their exigencies—

  when I fall, you give a little yawn as you unfold,

  and then a fireman comes to lift me, muscles rumpling his rubber coat,

  and I think that he will never age.

  Why can’t the mind simply roll around on its own wheels?

  Why can’t the body be rewired like a lamp?

  The other cell phone people draw a thread through the world and stitch it close

  whereas I go around huffing in a state of irritation

  that I take to be the honest state of nature,

  which is why I listen to the juncos, though it’s difficult to decode their words.

  And though I hold you, Moth, in my contempt, I’ve spoken through you

  for enough minutes from what the corporation calls my plan

  that your numbers have become infused with my mouth’s smell.

  It is not the junco’s bird-smell of vinegar and berries

  but that person-smell of roasted meat and sweat,

  and I could spray you with disinfectant but that would fry your circuitry—

  to wipe away the human would make you go kaput.

  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.

  Number One

  for Ben

  Animal attack is Number One in the list called

  “Ways in Which I Do Not Want to Die”—

  wait, Ben says knock it off with the death-talk;

  you’ve already talked death to death.

  But the Number Ones don’t need our speech

  to claim their cool dark storage place: my sister said

  hers was falling down the stairs, after her husband left

  and every riser turned into El Capitan.

  Sleeping on the sofa did nothing about the steps

  connecting the world to her front porch. Three is more

  than enough, given a new moon and tallow on the instep

  and the right force-vectors applied to the neck.

  I said Relax, you should join a health club

  so my sister rowed until she withered to a twig,

  and when the office microfiche clerk did fall down the stairs

  all that hemoglobin on the cellar floor

  sent my sister’s paw back to her popcorn bowl

  as she asked the darkness from a fetal pose

  about the safety of a pup tent

  set up in a housing tract.

  Thus do our Number Ones sit on our chests

  like sumo wrestlers
in lifeboats — rowing rowing.

  And some nights in my phantasmagloriland

  I am supped by shark or dingo dog or a cannibal king.

  Then I am a movie star (if not your classic movie star),

  just one of the shriekers who is always beautiful

  when her head spins suddenly

  and her hair fans.

  And what could Numbers Seven or Twelve offer by compare:

  those falling-elevator dreams

  the fire dreams

  the riptide dreams

  the dreams of death as a mere phenomenon of weather?

  I know my celebrity is fleeting as I thrash and holler and yet

  see the moviegoers prick up in their seats:

  see the good it does,

  how it is not so grim or tragic

  when the boy-hand spiders across girl-shouldermeat

  and she curls against him

  like a pink prawn thawing from the freezer.

  Then his hand goes tumbling to her breast—

  you see what magic I am giving them

  astir in frumpy velvet seats arrayed in front of my disquiet

  at this brink this moment when she lets it stay.

  Bert Wilson Plays Jim Pepper’s “Witchi-Tai-To” at the Midnight Sun

  Don’t look up, because the ceiling is suffering

  some serious violations of the electrical code,

  the whole chaotic kelplike mess

  about to shower us with flames.

  I think I can render this clearly enough—

  Bert’s saxophone hanging between his knees,

  propped against the wheelchair’s seat

  where his body keeps shape-shifting—

  he’s Buddha then shop-vac then Buddha again,

  formlessness floating on top of form.

  The problem is backstory, how to get it all in,

  not just Bert’s beanie and tie-dye T-shirt,

  but polio too, and the tune itself, concentric ripples

  widening. So now I send dead Jim Pepper

  rippling out, as well as his grandfather,

  fancy-dancing and chanting. How to tender

  the lead-in, would phonemes do any good

  (the signature DAHH, the doon doons down-marching)—

  or just call it a prayer to simplify things

  as Bert sends the melody way out

  beyond the tidiness of circles?

  Then he puts the mouthpiece aside

  to bring up the words from the floor of his soul

  or say from the pads of his spud-shaped feet

  spraddling the footplate, if soul is too hokey

  for all the misty goo inside us.

  First comes the Creek part of the song

  and then comes the English, when Bert throws back his chin:

  his underbeard raised in a coyote salute

  to the water infusing the warehouse roof.

  Here, take a seat on these rickety risers

  inside my head, though your life isn’t mine,

  still, I have hope for your hearing

  the gist of this refrain

  about how glad he is that he’s not dead.

  Accidental Dismemberment

  From Hartford, from Allentown, they used to send their letters—

  the corporate stationery featured the word LIFE.

  Somewhere radio towers twinked

  and garters held up the socks of men

  whose fine print said that if I ever lost my arm in a buzz-saw accident—

  boy, that would be the day my ship came in.

  So I pictured myself shopping for produce with my feet,

  a melon riding on my tarsal bones and money

  smoking in my pocket. But this dream-trafficking gave way

  to wondering what it took to land in jail—

  for steady meals and solitude

  and a tin cup to play the bars like a marimba!

  You might need enough time to write a book as long as Proust’s,

  yet not so much to fire up the chair they call Ol’ Sparky:

  so we’re talking a fine calibration here. To elsewhere

  my love and I will be speeding in the car

  when he’ll clap his ears: Stop I can’t stand any more this Looosha talk!

  leaving the steering wheel dangerously unattended

  though I tell him many writers think about the hoosegow

  as a meditative place. Especially now

  when the junk mail comes in photon blips,

  say from Mrs. Mobutu Sese Seko needing a little cash to tide her over

  and spokespersons for the penis you have to wind on a wheel

  like a garden hose. What insurance executive

  walks to work anymore while dreaming

  up fine print for my lost feet?

  There is much to envy in that woman

  who flaunts her perfect body on the Key West shore—

  yet five thousand dollars still seems like a lot of money,

  especially for one of these fingers I don’t use much.

  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,
r />   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 though the coastal range

  before it empties rain and blood into Willapa Bay.

  Garfield’s Dream

  Should we not know that James Garfield suffered from crippling writer’s block and simply could not finish his speech until 2:30 on the morning of the inaugural? As the day approached, he had an anxiety dream in which he fell off a canal boat and was suddenly standing naked in the wilderness during a wild storm. After finding a few pieces of cloth to cover himself and embarking on “a long and tangled journey,” he found his way to a house where “an old negro woman took me into her arms and nursed me as though I were a sick child.” Comforted, he awoke to face his presidency.

  TED WIDMER, The American Scholar, WINTER 2005

  Start with one cell, call it a zygote,

  call it a diploid that turns into me — fool, petunia, witch.

  Samaritan and crow. Endless nouns

  I could plug in. And yet my eye

  can be told from the world’s other billions of eyeballs

  by machines that map the galaxy

  of specks and glints that make up its blue ring.

  Then how to account for Garfield’s dream

  being the same one I’ve dreamed,

  except the old woman had a child and the child held a doll

  who was a replica of the child?

  I think there’s a me in a black veil

  who has dreamed it, too

  (because the crow is a fool because the witch will presume),

  as well as a me who’ll strap explosives to his chest

  tomorrow, when he’ll blow himself back

  into the disarray of cells.

  Dear Assassin:

  stay here with me in the dream—

  we have only a few more hours of night

  to be held together by neither our wife’s nor our mother’s arms.

  Sylvia Plath’s Hair

  for Marianne Boruch

  In Bloomington, Indiana, the librarian lugged it from the archive

  in a cardboard box, the kind that long-stemmed roses come in —

  there was even tissue paper she unfolded

  like someone parting a lover’s blouse

  or like the skin of a corpse being peeled by a pathologist,