Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo
his foot over the transmission hump
to forestall some calamity he thought would compromise
the hedges.
All the way back to Evanston you piloted the Mercury
like General Montgomery in his tank,
your friends huddled in the backseat, spines coiled,
arms cradled to their ribs —
as though each held a baby being rocked too furiously
for any payoff less than panic.
It’s the same motion your wife blames on some blown-out
muscle in her chest
when at the end of making love she pitches violently,
except instead of saying
something normal like god or jesus she screams ow! ow!
and afterward,
when you try sorting out her pleasure from her pain,
she refuses you the difference.
Maybe you wish you took the needle at Sczabo’s place —
what’s one more stick
among the many you’ll endure, your two friends not such
a far cry from being women,
machines shaking and arching in the wide backseat
as Sczabo’s doves appeared —
or so you thought then, though now you understand
all the gestures the body will employ
just to keep from puking. Snow was damping the concrete
and icing the trees,
a silence stoppered in the back of your friends’ throats
as you let the Mercury’s wheel pass
hand over hand, steering into the fishtails, remembering
your dad’s admonition:
when everything goes to hell the worst you can do
is hit the brakes.
Monorail
Seattle, at the old World’s Fair
He stands by the helm, his face full of blue
from the buildings at twilight, his hand
knuckled around a metal pole that keeps him
from falling, as he flies past the vaults
of startled mannequins, the red ohs of their lips.
Christmas lights are also falling
through the windshield, onto his chest:
right side green, left side red —
dark then back again.
Wait… my father is not moving yet:
no one has claimed the worn leather throne.
But his thoughts are moving, wondering
whether movement is the same as growing old
in the province of space, not time. Inside his shoes,
his toes are as blue as the city streets,
and the drum in his chest, his red-lit chest,
is growing dim. He knows the train he’s about to ride
has one rail: no steering, no turns.
And the only skill is in the brake.
The brake. His lips roll over the words:
the dead man’s brake. And a small boy
— come to ride up front — hears him,
tugs my father’s coat and asks:
Hey mister, are you the driver of this train?
Cairn for Future Travel
I was young for a minute, but then I got old.
Already the black cane stands by
the threshold, already my feet are flowerpots
in thick black shoes. So not long now
before I will have what follows:
a spidery hairnet to circle my scalp, a hand
callused enough to whack your ear. And with them,
the deep wisdom of Sicilian great-aunts:
how to plumb for the melon’s ripeness, how
to stand the loaves upright in my twine sack.
And you, are you ready? Have you brushed
your brown suitcoat and hat? Have you counted
your mahogany chessmen and oiled the zipper
on their leather case? Have you filled
your sack of crumbs for the pigeons?
In the park, men are waiting, raking
the bocce-court sand. And as for this second-floor
window where I shake my fist: soon you will learn
to feign deafness, fishing the silver ball
up from your loose, deep pocket.
from
The Oldest Map with the Name America
(1999)
The printing press could disseminate, but it could not retrieve.
To his annoyance, Waldseemüller himself learned the fantastic,
irreversible reach of this new technology. When Waldseemüller
changed his mind and decided that after all Amerigo Vespucci
should not be credited as the true discoverer of the New World,
it was too late.… The printed messages advertising America
were already diffused into a thousand places and could not
be recalled.
DANIEL J. BOORSTIN, THE DISCOVERERS
Beige Trash
Who is to blame for there being no tractors
churning the soil into veils
to drape over the telling
where and how I grew, in a suburb
with no men that I could in good conscience adorn
with prosthetic limbs or even crushed straw hats?
Kudzu was something we shouted
jujitsuing air like the Green Hornet’s sidekick
whose name still needed some time to ferment
in those years separating the yellow peril
from kung-fu mania, before BRUCE LEE
floated up to the marquee lights.
Like the stripers you could not eat
floating on top of the poisonous river,
to whose bank we never carried our burdens
and let them weep down into Jersey.
Because surely these words would have profited
from at least one silo lording over,