Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo
Neck, Zarephath, Spotswood — in every town
there were houses, in every house there’s a light.
Limits
The dead man.
Every now and again, I see him.
And the wildlife refuge where I worked then,
the shallow ponds of Leslie Salt Company
patchworking the San Francisco Bay edges
and spreading below the hills like broken tiles,
each pond a different color — from blue to green
to yellow until finally the burnished red
of terra-cotta, as the water grew denser
and denser with salt. Dunlins blew upward
like paper scraps torn from a single sheet,
clouds of birds purling in sunlight, harboring
the secret of escaped collision. And
that other mystery: how these weightless tufts
could make it halfway to Tierra del Fuego
and back before spring’s first good day.
On those good days, a group from the charity ward
named after the state’s last concession to saints
would trudge up the hill to the visitor center,
where I’d show them California shorebirds
— a stuffed egret, western sandpiper, and avocet —
whose feathers were matted and worn to shafts
from years of being stroked like puppies.
As I guided their hands over the pelts
questions stood on my tongue — mostly
about what led them to this peculiar life,
its days parceled into field trips
and visits to the library for picture books
with nurses whose enthusiasms were always greater
than their own. Their own had stalled out
before reaching the moist surface of their eyes,
some of the patients fitting pigeonholes built
in my head, like Down syndrome and hydrocephalus.
But others were not marked in any way,
and their defects cut closer to the bones
under my burnt-sienna ranger uniform.
Maybe I was foolish to believe in escape
from the future carried in their uncreased palms:
our lives overseen by the strict, big-breasted nurse
who is our health or our debts or even
our children, the her who is always putting crayons
and lumps of clay in our hands, insisting
we make our lives into some crude but useful thing.
And one day a man, a patient who must have been
supervised by his strict heart, fell down
suddenly and hard, on his way up the hill.
Two nurses prodded him on toward the building,
where he went down again like a duffel bag full of earth
in front of the reception desk where I was sitting.
I watched the one male nurse turn pale as ash
when he knelt to certify the heartbeat
of this man whose lips were blue and wet.
The other nurse took the group to the auditorium,
saying James isn’t feeling very well right now.
James is sick. Get away from him. Then I heard
the dopey music of the automated slide show
behind those doors from which she never reappeared.
The male nurse was too young to leave stranded
with a man down on the smooth wood floor:
his cheek still velvet, his dark fingers
worrying the valleys of the man’s white wrist.
He’s okay, he’s breathing, as the man’s skin
turned gray, his mouth open, a cherry sore
at either edge. I don’t remember what I did at first,
I must have puttered off to perform some
stupid task that would seem useful —
gathering premoistened towelettes
or picking up the phone while the nurse repeated
He’s okay, he’s breathing. But the colors
got worse until nothing could spare me
from having to walk my hand in the crease
of the man’s blue throat, where his carotid
should have pulsed. Nothing.
I said You breathe for him and I’ll compress,
and for a while we worked together like a clumsy
railroad handcar, me humping at arm’s length
over the ribs, the nurse sealing his lips around
the man’s scabbed mouth, while yellow mucus
drained from James’s eyes and nose and throat.
Each time the nurse pressed his mouth to the man’s
like a reluctant lover, the stink of cud
was on his lips when he lifted up. Sometimes
he had to hold his face out to the side,
to catch a few breaths of good salt air.
Until he was no longer able to choke back his gut
and asked whether I would trade places with him.
For a moment I studied the man’s staved chest,
which even my small knuckles had banged to jelly,
then the yellow pulp that flecked the nurse’s lips,
that sour, raw smell from their mix of spit.
And I said: No. I don’t think I could...
It’s strange what we do with the dead
— burning them or burying them in earth —
when the body always tries to revert to water.
Later, a doctor called to say the man’s heart
had exploded like a paper sack: death hooked him
before he even hit the floor. So everything we did
was useless — we might as well have banged a drum
and blown into a horn. And notice how I just said “we” —
as though the nurse and I had somehow married
spirits in a pact of gambled blood, when in truth
the nurse, like the man, rode off in an ambulance,
the man for a pointless go-round in the ER, the nurse
for a shot of gamma globulin, while I stood
in