Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo
equipment
parked nearby in a nest of wire
belonging to some good old boy named…
what? Leldon? Lemuel? But sorry:
in no barn did the whiskey bottles lie
like Confederate casualties at Appomattox —
no tent revivals, no cousins with red hair
and freckled hands, no words as exotic as po’boy
or chifforobe or muffuletta. Which meant
we had no means to wrangle Beauty
into the cathedrals of our mouths,
though on occasion an ordinary cow
could make the car’s eight-chambered heart
stop dead beside a pasture, where none of us
dared get out for fear of stampedes or hay fever
or maybe even fangs hidden behind the lips.
Call us ignorant: everything we knew poured out
those two-at-a-time black-and-white TVS —
one for picture, one for sound — & antlered
with coat hangers that gave even Hawaii Five-O
the speckling of constant winter. The snow
fell like the fur of our fat white dog
for whom my mother cooked lamb chops every night
in an attempt to cure its baldness,
while we dug our fingers in the chopmeat
before she slapped it into patties.
Then Star Trek came on. Then for an hour
the men faded in and out of light.
And there is nothing about this past
it does any service to the language to recall:
Art was what the fire department sold tickets to,
raising money for the hook and ladder.
It took place inside the school auditorium,
where an old Italian couple hid
by donning black and standing
just outside the purple spotlight.
Then music surged that was vaguely familiar
though we’d fail to lure its elaborate name
in from the borders of what we knew,
while the marionette-swan bobbled to its feet
as if newly born. I can say it now:
Tchaikovsky. Of course, the whole time
they worked the sticks and strings,
the puppeteers stood right out in the open.
Yet how silently they moved, how easy
a thing they were to pretend we couldn’t see.
Foley
It is Harrison Ford who just saved the world,
but when he walks down a dirt road toward the ultralarge sun
what sound like his boots are really bricks being drudged
through a boxful of coffee beans. And the mare you’ve seen
clopping along those nineteenth-century cobbles —
she’s a coconut struck by a ball-peen hammer.
And the three girls riding in the hansom,
where the jouncing rustles their silk-and-bone:
that’s a toothbrush moving across birchbark.
Even the moment when one kickboxer’s perfect body
makes contact with the other kickboxer’s perfect body
has nothing to do with kickboxing, or bodies,
but the concrete colliding with the abstract of perfection,
which molts into a leather belt spanking a side of beef.
This is the problem with movies:
go to enough of them and pretty soon the world
starts sounding wrongly synced against itself: e.g.,
last night when I heard a noise below my bedroom window
that sounded like the yowl a cat would make
if its tongue were being yanked backward out its ass.
Pain, I thought. Help, I thought,
so at two a.m. I went outside with a flashlight
and found a she-cat corkscrewed to a tom,
both of them humped and quivering where the beam flattened
against the grass whose damp was already wicking
through my slippers. Aaah… love, I thought,
or some distantly cousined feline analogue of love,
or the feline analogue of the way love came out of the radio
in certain sixties pop songs that had the singer keening
antonyms: how can something so right feel so wrong,
so good hurt so bad… you know what I’m talking about.
And don’t you think it’s peculiar:
in the first half of the sixties they made the black girl-groups
sing with white accents and in the second half of the sixties
they made the white girl-groups sing with black accents,
which proves that what you hear is always
some strange alchemy of what somebody thinks you’ll pay for
and what you expect. Love in particular
it seems to me we’ve never properly nailed down
so we’ll know it when we hear it coming, the way
screaming “Fire!” means something to the world.
I remember this guy who made noises against my neck
that sounded like when after much tugging on a jar lid
you stick a can opener under its lip—that little tsuck.
At first I thought this must be
one of love’s least common dialects, though later
when I found the blue spots all over I realized
it was malicious mischief, it was vandalism, it was damage.
Everybody has a story about the chorus of these,
love’s faulty hermeneutics: the muffler in retreat
mistaken for the motor coming, the declaration
of loathing construed as the minor reproach;
how “Babe, can I borrow five hundred bucks?”
gets dubbed over “Goodbye, chump”—of course,
of course, and you slap your head but it sounds funny,
not enough sizzle, not enough snap. If only
Berlitz had cracked the translations or we had conventions
like the international code of semaphores;
if only some equivalent of the Captain Midnight