Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo
When the doctor runs out of words and still
I won’t leave, he latches my shoulder and
steers me out doors. Where I see his blurred hand,
through the milk glass, flapping goodbye like a sail
(& me not griefstruck yet but still amazed: how
words and names — medicine’s blunt instruments—
undid me. And the seconds, the half seconds
it took for him to say those words). For now,
I’ll just stand in the courtyard, watching bodies
struggle in then out of one lean shadow
a tall fir lays across the wet flagstones.
Before the sun clears the valance of gray trees
and finds the surgical-supply shop’s window
and makes the dusty bedpans glint like coins.
Kilned
I was trying to somehow keep [my early pieces] true to their nature,
to allow the crudeness to be their beauty. Now I want the lava to
teach me what it does best.
STEPHEN LANG
These days when my legs twitch like hounds under the sheets
and the eyes are troubled by a drifting fleck —
I think of him: the artist
who climbs into the lava runs at Kalapana,
the only person who has not fled from town
fearing the advance of basalt tongues.
He wears no special boots, no special clothes,
no special breather mask to save him
from poison fumes. And it is hot, so hot
the sweat drenches him and shreds his clothes
as he bends to plunge his shovel
where the earth’s bile has found its way to surface.
When he catches fire, he’ll roll in a patch of moss
then simply rise and carry on. He will scoop
this pahoehoe, he will think of Pompeii
and the bodies torqued in final grotesque poses.
Locals cannot haul away their wooden churches fast enough,
they call this the wrath of Madame Pele,
the curse of a life that was so good
they should have known to meet it with suspicion.
But this man steps into the dawn and its yellow flames,
spins each iridescent blue clod in the air
before spreading it on a smooth rock ledge to study.
First he tries to see what this catastrophe is saying.
Then, with a trowel in his broiling hand,
he works to sculpt it into something human.
Women Who Sleep on Stones
Women who sleep on stones are like
brick houses that squat alone in cornfields.
They look weatherworn, solid, dusty,
torn screens sloughing from the window frames.
But at dusk a second-story light is always burning.
Used to be I loved nothing more
than spreading my blanket on high granite ledges
that collect good water in their hollows.
Stars came close without the trees
staring and rustling like damp underthings.
But doesn’t the body foil what it loves best?
Now my hips creak and their blades are tender.
I can’t rest on my back for fear of exposing
my gut to night creatures who might come along
and rip it open with a beak or hoof.
And if I sleep on my belly, pinning it down,
my breasts start puling like baby pigs
trapped under their slab of torpid mother.
Dark passes as I shift from side to side
to side, the blood pooling just above the bone.
Women who sleep on stones don’t sleep.
They see the stars moving, the sunrise, the gnats
rising like a hairnet lifted from a waitress’s head.
The next day they’re sore all over and glad
for the ache: that’s how stubborn they are.
Compulsory Travel
Not yet did we have personalities to interfere
with what we were: two sisters, two brothers.
Maybe our parents really were people who walked in the world,
were mean or kind, but you’d have to prove it to us.
They were the keepers of money, the signers of report cards,
the drivers of cars. We had a station wagon.
Back home we even had a dog, who was fed
by a neighbor kid while we toured the Jersey shore.
We waded in the motel pool and clung
to the edge of the deep end, because we couldn’t swim.
Maybe that’s why we never went in the ocean, despite
hours of driving. We could’ve just gone down the block!
Yet each year we made a ritual of this week
spent yelling and cursing and swatting each other,
with none of the analyses we now employ, the past
used as ammunition, the glosses from our latest therapist.
Back then a sock in the jaw could set anyone straight.
On Sunday afternoon, the homeward traffic would grind still
where the turnpike bottlenecked. My father
would slam his forehead against the steering wheel,
start changing lanes and leaning on the horn.
Without breeze through the window, the car would hold
our body heat like an iron skillet, skin peeling
from our burned shoulders as we hurled pretzels
and gave the finger to kids stopped in cars beside us.
My mother wouldn’t mention the turn we’d missed
a few miles back; instead she’d fold the map
and jam it resolutely in the glove box while we crept on.
Perhaps this was our finest hour, as the people
we were becoming took shape and began to emerge:
the honkers of horns and the givers of fingers.
After the sun turned red and disappeared, we rolled
through darkness, wondering if the world knew all its