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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Note to Reader
from Dangerous Life (1989)
The News (A Manifesto)
First Job/Seventeen
Dangerous Life
The Revelation
from The Body Mutinies (1996)
How Western Underwear Came to Japan
Skin
Inseminator Man
Tripe
At St. Placid’s
The Roots of Pessimism in Model Rocketry, the Fallacy of Its Premise
The Body Mutinies
Kilned
Women Who Sleep on Stones
Compulsory Travel
Limits
Needles
Monorail
Cairn for Future Travel
from The Oldest Map with the Name America (1999)
Beige Trash
Foley
Air Guitar
Pomegranate
Crash Course in Semiotics
Serotonin
Lament in Good Weather
The Oldest Map with the Name America
Home
The Salmon underneath the City
The Ghost Shirt
from Luck Is Luck (2005)
To My Big Nose
Languedoc
The Crows Start Demanding Royalties
On the Destruction of the Mir
Le deuxième sexe
The Floating Rib
Original Sin
The Cardinal’s Nephews
White Bird/Black Drop
On the High Suicide Rate of Dentists
Freshwater and Salt
In the Confessional Mode, with a Borrowed Movie Trope
Fubar
Bulletin from Somewhere up the Creek
Urban Legend
A Simple Camp Song
from Book of Bob
My Eulogy Was Deemed Too Strange
Conscription Papers
Night Festival, Olympia
Eulogy from the Boardwalk behind the KFC
Shrike Tree
Chum
from Inseminating the Elephant (2009)
Virtue Is the Best Helmet
Found Object
Rebuttal
A Romance
from Notes from My Apprenticeship
Incubus
First Epistle of Lucia to Her Old Boyfriends
Raised Not by Wolves
Job Site, 1967
Postcard from Florida
Transcendentalism
January/Macy’s/The Bra Event
The Van with the Plane
Snowstorm with Inmates and Dogs
Early Cascade
Twenty-Five Thousand Volts per Inch
The Garbo Cloth
A Pedantry
Martha
Breaking News
For the First Crow with West Nile Virus to Arrive in Our State
Altered Beast
On the Chehalis River
Inseminating the Elephant
For the Mad Cow in Tenino
from On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (2012)
The Second Slaughter
Again, the Body
To the Field of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall
Domestic
I Could Name Some Names
Cold Snap, November
Auntie Roach
Wheel
Pioneer
300D
Lubricating the Void
Freak-Out
Maypole
Les Dauphins
The Unturning
Bats
This Red T-Shirt
The Wolves of Illinois
Pharaoh
Samara
New Poems
Daisies vs. Bees
Bruce
Blacktail
The Great Wave
Water Theory
Elegy for Idle Curiosity
Belated Poem in the Voice of the Pond
Early December, Two Weeks Shy
*Speckled and Silver
My Only Objection
FREE
Eschatological
A Little Death, Suitable for Framing
Etiology of My Illness
Rotator Cuff Vortex
Message Unscripted
Women in Black
The Rape of Blanche DuBois
What I Know
Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones
Yellow Claw
Day-Moon
About the Author
Books by Lucia Perillo
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks
from
Dangerous Life
(1989)
Ah, my friend, I sometimes think that I
lead a highly dangerous life, since I’m
one of those machines that can burst apart!
NIETZSCHE
The News (A Manifesto)
So today, yet another Guyanese will try to run the border
dressed in a dead housewife’s hair—all they’ve recovered
since her disappearance in a downtown shopping mall.
An “incident,” the paper says. Another “routine occurrence”—
wresting my trust from the publicans
assigned to keeping us safe, whole. Rather:
vow to stay vigilant against the maiming
that waits in each landscape, even in this
mundane procession of muddy spring days. To see
the tenacity of rooted hair for what it is:
an illusion as fleeting as courage. To keep the meat
between one’s ribs from being torn, to keep the hard
marble of the cranium covered with its own skin.
To stay vigilant. To watch the signs of violence stirring
even in one’s own machine. To keep both breasts
attached and undiseased. To keep the womb empty;
and yet to keep the organs living there
from shriveling like uneaten fruit, from turning
black and dropping. And not to mistake the danger
for a simple matter of whether
to put the body on the streets, of walking
or of staying home—; there are household cleansers
that can scar a woman deeper than a blade
or dumdum bullets. The kitchen drawers are full
of tools
that lie unchaperoned. Even with the doors and windows
bolted, in the safety of my bed, I am haunted by the sound
of him (her, it, them) stalking the hallway,
his long tongue already primed with Pavlovian drool.
Or him waiting in the urine-soaked garages of this city’s
leading department stores, waiting to deliver up the kiss
of a gunshot, the blunted kiss of a simple length of pipe.
But of course I mean a larger fear: the kiss
of amputation, the therapeutic kiss of cobalt.
The kiss of a deformed child. Of briefcase efficiency
and the forty-hour workweek. Of the tract home:
the kiss of automatic garage-door openers that
despite the dropped eyelid of their descent do nothing
to bar a terror needing no window for entry:
it resides within. And where do we turn for protection
from our selves? My mother, for example, recommends marriage—
to a physician or some other wealthy healer. Of course
it’s him, leering from his station behind her shoulder,
who’s making her say such things: the witch doctor,
headhunter, the corporate shaman, his scalpel
drawn & ready, my scalp his ticket out.
First Job/Seventeen
Gambelli’s waitresses sometimes got down on their knees
searching for coins dropped into the carpet—
hair coiled and stiff, lips coated in that hennaed shade of red,
the banner-color for lives spent in the wake of husbands
dying without pensions, their bodies used in ceaseless
marching toward the kitchen’s mouth, firm legs
migrating slowly ankleward. From that doorway,
Frankie Gambelli would sic a booze-eye on them,
his arms flapping in an earthbound pantomime of that
other Frank: The Swooned-Over. “You old cunts,”
he’d mutter. “Why do I put up with you old cunts?”—
never managing to purge his voice’s tenor note
of longing. At me—the summer girl—he’d only stare
from between his collapsing red lids, eyes that were empty.
Once I got stiffed on a check when a man jerked
out of his seat, craned around, then bolted
from those subterranean women, sweaty and crippled
in the knees. Though I chased him up the stairs to the street,
the light outside was blinding and I lost the bastard
to that whiteness, and I betrayed myself with tears.
But coming back downstairs my eyes dried on another vision:
I saw that the dusk trapped by the restaurant’s plastic greenery
was really some residual light of that brilliance happening
above us on the street. Then for a moment the waitresses
hung frozen in midstride—cork trays outstretched—
like wide-armed, reeling dancers, the whole
some humming and benevolent machine that knew no past, no future—
only balanced glasses, and the good coin in the pocket.
Sinatra was singing “Jealous Lover.” All of us were young.
Dangerous Life
I quit med school when I found out the stiff they gave me
had book 9 of Paradise Lost and the lyrics
to “Louie Louie” tattooed on her thighs.
That morning as the wind was mowing
little ladies on a street below, I touched a Bunsen burner
to the Girl Scout sash whose badges were the measure of my worth:
Careers…
Cookery, Seamstress…
and Baby Maker… all gone up in smoke.
But I kept the merit badge marked Dangerous Life,
for which, if you remember, the girls were taken to the woods
and taught the mechanics of fire,
around which they had us dance with pointed sticks
lashed into crucifixes that we’d wrapped with yarn and wore
on lanyards round our necks, calling them our “Eyes of God.”
Now my mother calls the pay phone outside my walk-up, raving
about what people think of a woman — thirty, unsettled,
living on food stamps, coin-op Laundromats & public clinics.
Some nights I take my lanyards from their shoebox, practice baying
those old camp songs to the moon. And remember how they told us
that a smart girl could find her way out of anywhere, alive.
The Revelation
I hit Tonopah at sunset,
just when the billboards advertising the legal brothels
turn dun-colored as the sun lies
down behind the strip mine.
And the whores were in the Safeway,
buying frozen foods and Cokes
for the sitters before their evening shifts.
Yes they gave excuses to cut
ahead of me in line, probably wrote bad checks,
but still they were lovely at that hour,
their hair newly washed
and raveling. If you follow
any of the fallen far enough
— the idolaters, the thieves and liars —
you will find that beauty, a cataclysmic
beauty rising off the face of the burning landscape
just before the appearance of the beast, the beauty
that is the flower of our dying into another life.
Like a Möbius strip: you go round once
and you come out on the other side.
There is no alpha, no omega,
no beginning and no end.
Only the ceaseless swell
and fall of sunlight on these rusted hills.
Watch the way brilliance turns
on darkness. How can any of us be damned.
from
The Body Mutinies
(1996)
— The people are like wolves to me!
— You mustn’t say that, Kaspar.
Look at Florian — he lost his father in an accident, he is blind, but does he complain? No, he plays the piano the whole day and it doesn’t matter that his music sounds a little strange.
WERNER HERZOG
THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER
How Western Underwear Came to Japan
When Tokyo’s Shirokiya Dry Goods caught fire
in the thirties, shopgirls tore the shelves’ kimonos
and knotted them in ropes. Older women used
both hands, descending safely from the highest floors
though their underskirts flew up around their hips.
The crowded street saw everything beneath—
ankles, knees, the purple flanges of their sex.
Versus the younger girls’ careful keeping
one hand pinned against their skirts, against
the nothing under them and their silk falling.
Skin
Back then it seemed that wherever a girl took off her clothes
the police would find her—
in the backs of cars or beside the dark night ponds, opening
like a green leaf across
some boy’s knees, the skin so taut beneath the moon
it was almost too terrible,
too beautiful to look at, a tinderbox, though she did not know.
But the men who came
beating the night rushes with their flashlights and thighs —
they knew. About Helen,
about how a body could cause the fall of Troy and the death
of a perfectly good king.
So they read the boy his rights and shoved him spread-legged
against the car
while the girl hopped barefoot on the asphalt, cloaked
in a wool rescue blanket.
Or sometimes girls fled so their fathers wouldn’t hit them,
their legs flashing as they ran.
And the boys were handcuffed just until their wrists had welts
and let off half a block from home.
God for how many years did I believe there were truly laws
against such things,
laws of adulthood: no yelling out of cars in traffic tunnels,
no walking without shoes,
no singing any foolish songs in public places. Or else
they could lock you in jail
or condemn your self and soul by telling both your lower-
and uppercase Catholic fathers.
And out of all these crimes, unveiling the body was of course
the worst, as though something
about the skin’s phosphorescence, its surface as velvet
as a deer’s new horn,
could drive not only men but civilization mad, could lead us
to unspeakable cruelties.
There were elders who from experience understood these things
much better than we.
And it’s true: remembering I had that kind of skin does drive me
half-crazy with loss.
Skin like the spathe of a broad white lily
on the first morning it unfurls.
Inseminator Man
When I call him back now, he comes dressed in the silver of memory,
silver coveralls and silver boots