Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones Read online

  Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size:

  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque euismod magna ac

  Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible.

  When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

  Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

  This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.

  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