Inseminating the Elephant Read online

  Lucia Perillo

  Inseminating the Elephant

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  Inseminating the Elephant

  Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out.

  Chekhov

  For Hayden Carruth (1921–2008) for cheering me on.

  And for James Rudy for picking me up.

  Virtue Is the Best Helmet

  One of these days I’m going to get myself an avatar

  so I can ride an archaeopteryx in cyberspace—

  goodbye, the meat cage.

  Pray the server doesn’t crash, pray

  against the curse of carpal tunnel syndrome.

  But then my friend the lactation consultant

  brings up the quadriplegic who gave birth

  (two times no less)

  (motorcycle wreck)

  just to make her body do

  one thing the meat could still remember.

  Somebody has to position the babies

  to sip the breastmilk rivulets.

  And the cells exude

  despite their slumber. One minute

  too much silence, the next there’s so much screaming.

  Turns out Madagascar’s giant cockroach

  makes a good addition to a robot

  because the living brain adds up to more than: motor,

  tracking ball, and the binary numeric code.

  Usually the cockroach flees from light,

  but sometimes it stands in its little coach unmoving,

  stymied by the dumb fact of air.

  And sometimes it rams into a wall

  to force the world to show its hand.

  Found Object

  Somebody left this white T-shirt

  like a hangman’s hood on the new parking meter—

  the magic marks upon its back say: I QUIT METH 4-EVER.

  A declaration to the sky, whose angels all wear seagull wings

  swooping over this street with its torn scratch tickets

  and Big Gulp cups dropped by the curb.

  Extra large, it has been customized

  with a pocketknife or a canine tooth

  to rough the armholes where my boobs wobble out

  as I roam these rooms lit by twilight’s bulb,

  feeling half like Bette Davis in a wheelchair

  and half like that Hells Angels kingpin with the tracheotomy.

  Dear reader, do you know that guy?

  I didn’t think so. If only we could all watch the same tv.

  But no doubt you have seen the gulls flying,

  and also the sinister bulked-up crows

  carrying white clouds of hotdog buns in their beaks:

  you can promise them you’ll straighten up, but they are such big cynics.

  I should have told you My lotto #’s 2-11-19-23-36

  is what’s written in front, beside the silk screen

  for Listerine Cool Mint PocketPaks™—

  which means you can’t hijack my name;

  no, you have to go find your own, like a Hopi brave.

  You might have to sit in a sweat lodge until you pass out

  or eat a weird vine and it will not be pleasant. Your pulse

  goes staccato like a Teletype machine — then blam

  you’ll be transformed into your post-larval being.

  Maybe swallowtail, maybe moth: trust me, I know

  because once I was a baby blue convertible

  but now I’m this black hot rod painted with flames.

  Rebuttal

  My quarrel with the Old Masters is: they never made suffering big enough—

  that tiny leg sliding into the bay almost insults me,

  that it should be all we get of the falling boy after the half-hour stunt

  of his famous flying. Don’t you see

  they are cartoons? the drunk hissed

  in the British Museum, a drunk in a sport coat

  that made him look credible at first, some kind of docent,

  an itinerant purveyor of glosses that left me

  confused. I studied Brueghel’s paintings, tiny

  skaters, and hunters come home with tiny dead animals

  gutted outside the frame, where the tiny offal

  presumably had been left. I was looking for Icarus

  but the Musée des Beaux-Arts is in Belgium you twit

  and so I did not see the plowman wearing his inexplicably

  dainty shoes, a cartoon you American sow,

  and no one came to my rescue in that gallery vacated

  even by its dust. Where I also did not see the galleon

  anchored below the plowman’s pasture with its oblivious,

  content-with-being-tiny sheep. But just wait

  until that ship sails out

  and encounters the kind of storm that’ll require Abstract

  Expressionism to capture the full feeling of.

  The giant canvases of the twentieth century!

  Swaths of color with no figures in them at all!

  How immense the drowning when you’re the boy who drowns.

  Between the fireball on your back and the water in front

  all gray and everywhere and hard as concrete when you smack down.

  “Dona”

  Many of the Girl Scout songs

  extorted a smile, our servile mugging—

  but this one we loved best.

  Starring a calf being hauled in a minor key,

  its refrain two mournful syllables: dona.

  First came the long o—an induction/seduction

  to join the animal’s cargo cult, then came

  the short a, when the calf turned to beef

  with no last meal and no reprieve.

  The gist of the lyric: that we could choose

  to be the calf in the cart or a bird in the sky;

  the idea was simple, but also a lie: dona.

  Bird is small and can fly where it wants

  but it’ll never be Miss Teen USA,

  whereas the word abattoir was a chic French kiss

  our tongues would enter willingly.

  Let that bird flitter off

  like a dry dead leaf: this was a hymn

  that we sang on our knees

  on the dais by the flag, dressed in our sashes

  and green berets like irregulars planning

  a suicide mission: there was glory ahead

  when we signed on, clambered into the wagon,

  and let the future hitch up its horse.

  A Romance

  I saw a child set down her
binder like a wall

  through the candy bin at the Corner Luncheonette

  so she could scoop out gum while she spoke to the clerk—

  and from that moment was in love: Oh theft.

  College was supposed to straighten me

  like a bent tree strangled by a wire,

  but being done with sweetness I could not resist the lure of meat.

  How the red muscle gleamed in its shiny wrap,

  a wedge that had once been the thigh or the loin

  of a slow brute’s body, sugar-dirt and clotted grass

  to be snatched in an instant

  and zipped into the crone-y-est of pocketbooks.

  Radiance housed in rawhide again, as when it was living.

  A steak can be stuck in your jeans when you’re skinny,

  a rump roast is right for a puffy down coat,

  small chops will fit under a thin peasant blouse

  where it falls off the breasts

  like a woodland river

  with a limestone amphitheater underneath.

  Ancient city, ancient sublet, ancient wooden fire escape—

  with my other bandits I learned to say how-de-do in French.

  We were yanking on the cord that would start the motor of our lives

  though we did not have the choke adjusted yet.

  Sometimes it seemed I floated in the dregs like a tea bag

  bloating up with facts.

  Until a girl ran in the door, panting hard, face red,

  slab thudding

  from her snowflake-damasked waist onto the table,

  and we stood around it gawking at the way it seemed to breathe.

  Notes from My Apprenticeship

  COMPARATIVE MORPHOLOGY OF THE VERTEBRATES

  Knowledge shipped north in white plastic buckets.

  To pry the lid off was to open a tomb.

  We began with the shark

  and worked our way up through the frog and the dove—

  each month we groped the swamp like fugitives

  to raise the next ghoul on the syllabus.

  With a bright blade I sliced through the pelt’s wet mess,

  exposing the viscera inside, tinted with latex

  — blue for the veins, yellow for lymph—

  it made me feel childish to see how far

  somebody thought I needed the body to be

  dumbed down. Outside was dumbed down

  by late day’s half-dark, as snowflakes dropped into

  Lac Saint-Louis, paddled in silence by great northern pike,

  their insides mangled by old hooks.

  No place in them conformed to its

  depiction in the charts, but the first lesson

  was sameness: from the frog in one bucket

  to the frog in the next—

  no surprises ahead in the formaldehyde of my life:

  obedient fugitive,

  go on,

  roll up your sleeve,

  plunge your arm in.

  WHITE RAT

  Etherized in a bell jar, they resembled tiny sandbags, stacked

  We carried each by its tail, their feet like newborn grappling hooks

  Their insides had vaginal qualities, pink and wet and gleaming

  The tissue hummed

  My scalpel got jittery

  I sewed up my rat as soon as I could

  Because I realized the spiderwebstuff holding us here is thin

  It was in fact difficult to account for all the people walking around not dead

  I don’t think I ever cut the gland I was supposed to, out

  In the coming weeks, in lab-light, I made up little prayers-slash-songs

  Like: Please white rat

  Let me not have damaged you

  You to whom I will be shackled all my years

  You out of all your million brethren

  If not genetically identical, then close

  My rat went back to its Tupperware basin

  With the cedar chips and the drinking bottle

  That went chingle chingle whenever water was sipped

  Which reassured me, knowing my rat was staying well hydrated

  Though most of them languished

  Which was, after all, their purpose

  Though my rat stayed fat

  Suggesting I’d botched the job of excising its adrenal

  Not that its fatness saved it in the end

  When all the living ones were gassed

  Because the Christmas break had nearly come

  Because of the deadline for the postmortem dissection

  And time for the final roundup of facts

  Oh rat

  As you snuffle through your next incarnation

  Say as my albino postman

  Or my Japanese neurologist who taps her mallet on my knee

  While I try not to visualize myself with your pink eyes and flaky scalp

  Your scabrous tail especially

  Because I have killed plenty of other things

  But none of them have claimed me the way you did

  THE TURTLE’S HEART

  When we arrived, each belly-shell had a hole

  whose clean edge signified that a power tool had been used

  by the glamorous lab assistant

  still wearing her goggles,

  her long hair puffed up by the grimy rubber strap.

  When I looked down, there was the heart

  bumping in the hole,

  and when I looked sideways

  my braid dipped in like a paintbrush.

  Summers I spent in a WPA hut

  where the turtles lived outside in a mortared pit.

  Their beaks would strain open

  for the pink gobs of dog food

  riding the tines of battered forks my job was to clamp

  into the dark hands of juvenile delinquents from the city.

  One night a raccoon, or a fox, I don’t know, climbed in

  and opened the turtles as if they were clams

  and left the hearts stretched on the ramparts

  like surreal clocks—

  even my thuggiest felon shivered as they ticked.

  Little motorized phlegm-ball, little plug of chewing gum,

  your secret is your frailty

  once your outer walls are breached.

  Makes me think of that submarine buried under the sea,

  the sailors banging on the pipes

  as if the water had ears.

  Back in the lab, we fished up from the hole

  the muscle’s pointy end and tied it

  to an oscillograph whose pen-arm moved at first in even sweeps.

  Until a drop

  of substance X made the graph go wild—

  the heart scrawling in its feral penmanship

  see what little of yourself you own.

  DENVER WILDLIFE RESEARCH CENTER

  The coyotes had to eat, which was the reason for the few bedraggled sheep kept in a pasture by the freeway.

  We entered wearing coveralls stamped Property of the United States, the crotch of mine holstering my knees, while my tall boss strained the hem of his armpit when he lifted his pistol.

  The sheep fell hard, as though she dropped a long way down.

  He strung her up by her feet on the fence and commenced sawing with a buck knife, to expose the entrails that shined like a bag of amber marbles.

  These he tore out and threw into a bucket, before pinching off the bladder and spilling it by the fence, where steam rose from a patch of crusted snow.

  You can throw up if you want to, he said, and, because I’d been given no job but to carry a pail, I understood this to be a kind of test.

  A test to let him know what kind of daughter I would be: dogged, like a coyote, or meek, like the sheep, when, later, we would lace the carcass with poison to find out how much was needed to leave half the coyotes dead.

  (Another test, the LD50: LD for lethal dose.)

  More sheep-daug
hter than dog-daughter, I did not think about the coyotes who paced along the chain-link of their cages or about the barn owls who lived tethered to their boxes in a field of wild asparagus.

  Instead of thinking I was making sure I didn’t throw up and didn’t faint, even though the insides of the sheep were hotter than I expected and smelled more sweet.

  THE CHAMBER

  As does the poem by William Blake, this involves a poison worm,

  a worm that would make the blackbird who ate it

  flap and squawk in distress

  while at regular intervals I played a tape of a bird

  also squawking in distress, so you see

  there was this salt-box-girl regression going on

  while I took notes: Now the bird is squawking in distress,

  my job being to watch on closed-circuit tv

  and record the bird’s death, were that to occur

  in the chamber made from a gutted fridge

  rigged up to a button in the next room

  where, when I pushed, I’d hear a musical plink

  over the loudspeaker as a mealworm dropped

  from a crown of vials that sat on the chamber,

  the crown rotating as the glass vials tipped,

  one worm per plink, though I sometimes plinked twice

  if the worm got stuck

  or if the bird failed to squawk

  in that tiny brick building that rustled with wings

  from birds scritching in cages

  I’d been filling for weeks,

  my truck full of traps I set on fence posts at dawn,

  when the redwings clung

  to tall blades in the ditches

  and sang shuck-shreeek as the dirt road fumed

  behind me in the mirrors, while ahead bore a rising

  redwinged sun that I drove into

  feeling immortal,

  how could I not feel immortal

  when I was mistress of the poison worm?

  SUPER 8

  There were so many black birds I could not count,

  homing on this patch of dusk. My boss’s idea

  had been to spray them with spangles

  so that, if found, the finder would know

  the bird had stopped here at this cornfield

  behind the Super 8 motel. That is,

  if he could imagine the helicopter

  with its tank of glue and light.

  Otherwise, he might just wonder at a spangled bird.

  We untangled them from the mist nets

  and brought them into the bathroom’s white-tile grid

  thirty feet east of the blacktop stripe,

  where I counted the spangles, a soldier

  in the tribe of useless data. Afterward