On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

by Lucia Perillo

  though you globulous yet advanced beings

  have surely taken a gander of our sizzling planet

  and can see us even through our garments.

  So you know about the little line—

  how a soft animal cleaves from her

  and how we swaddle it in fluff,

  yet within twenty years we send it forth

  with a shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled-grenade launcher:

  you have probably worked out a theory

  to explain the transformation. And you

  have noticed how she looks a bit uncertain

  as she stands on her right leg, her left thrust out

  as if she’s put her foot on top of something

  to keep it hidden. Could be an equation

  on a Post-it, or could be a booby trap—

  now comes time to admit we do not know her very well, she

  who has slipped the noose of our command. Be careful

  when you meet her, riding on her shaft of solar wind:

  you will have to break her like a wishbone

  to get her open, she whom we filled with teeth

  and knives and snakes and bees.

  Fireball

  The TV knob was made of resin, its gold skirt

  like a Kewpie doll’s, but it was gone.

  So we changed the channel

  with a pair of pliers (on the flat spot

  on the spindle): chunk chunk

  and then lo, Jerry Lewis. Chunk chunk and lo,

  the marionettes with giant hands. The song went:

  my heart would be a fireball. And in the chunking

  and the singing and the watching, lo, my heart became one.

  Less pageantry in the now. Say Sputnik: no other word

  climbs my throat with such majestic flames.

  Gone, the marionettes in flightsuits made of foil

  gone grainy on the boob tube. The tremulous way

  their bodies moved, my fear for their well-being.

  The comic stupidity of the child,

  which is forgiven. Unlike the stupidities to come.

  The boy had a guinea pig named Fireball, so I taught him

  the song by way of mourning

  when it died. He still possessed his sweetness,

  unlike older sons who think you are a moron without big

  subwoofers in your car. To that son I say:

  you may think you’re one of the alpha-carnivores

  just because you’ve shot many avatars of whores

  on a video screen that you will never have the Cuban missile crisis on;

  you do not even really have the bomb, and how can anyone

  command their cool without the bomb: Sam Cooke, James Dean,

  those boys lived kitty-corner to their annihilation.

  But my son glazes— what’s so special about the past

  when everyone has one? And yours, he says,

  is out of gas. Then vroom, he’s off—

  you might think his car is breathing by the way the windows

  bend. Welcome to the new world, Mom,

  he says, if you hear singing, it ain’t a song.

  To Carlos Castaneda

  After the physics final, Gina and I, in our mukluks

  scuffed past the swanky shops on Sherbrooke

  then climbed the mountain in the city. December 5,

  1975: I tried to will myself to have a vision, though the stars

  would not cooperate— instead of a sweat lodge

  or a kiva, the warm-up hut at the top of Mount Royal

  looked completely un-aboriginal, a replica in miniature

  of the Château de Versailles. With night all around us

  cold and thick as glass, I don’t know how the starlight

  managed to pass through it to sting me, it was hard enough

  to lift my hand to knock the door, a joke,

  it was so late. And here past the midpoint of my life

  I think I’ll die without a paranormal apparition

  to which I could wholeheartedly attest. I am not sure

  I even have a soul, a corny soul, a little puppet

  made of cream and feathers. Yet the door

  did open (turned out to be only six p.m.)

  and the old man said, Ah jeunes filles, il paraît que vous

  avez froid. Then he unstacked two chairs and set them

  down before the fire, still chewing its meal of logs

  in the giant hearth. Inside the château of our silence,

  we sat and chewed our lips: wasn’t the sacred knowledge

  supposed to involve telepathy with animals, and astral travel

  to planets made of light? Kindness (b) seemed too corny

  to be the answer (Restez ici pour le temps que vous

  voudrez) though we were given no other choice

  except (a) his sweeping, and (c) the mice inside the walls.

  300D

  When he was flush, we ate dinner

  at Tung Sing on Central Avenue

  where my father liked the red-dye-number-toxic

  bright and shiny food: spareribs, sweet—

  and-sour pork— what else

  was there to care about, except his sleep

  under the pup tent of the news? And the car,

  which was a Cadillac until he saw how they

  had become the fortresses of pimps—

  our hair may look stylish now,

  but in the photograph it always turns against us:

  give it time and it will turn. Maybe it was in 1976

  he went to see the enemy, the man

  (with sideburns) who sold German cars

  and said: take it easy, step at a time,

  see how the diesel motor sounds

  completely different. So off he went tink-tink-tink

  around the block in the old neighborhood

  where he imagined people (mostly black: by now

  his mouth had mastered the word’s exhale,

  then cut) lifting their heads to look (-kuh).

  And he, a short man, sat up taller as he swung

  back into the lot to make the deal, although

  to mitigate the shift in his allegiances

  (or was this forgiveness?— for the Germans

  had bombed his boat as he sailed through Gibraltar)

  he kept the color constant. Champagne,

  the color of a metal in a dream, no metal

  you could name, although they tried

  with a rich man’s drink. He could afford it now

  though it made him feel a little silly, his hand a lump

  of meat around the glass’s narrow, girlish stem.

  Photograph: The Enemy

  Great-Uncle Stefan wears the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s sailor suit,

  its cap flat and black, his long

  dark hair pomaded in a stiff

  blunt skirt behind his neck.

  There’s something about the nose’s

  bulb-and-nostril conglomeration that we share,

  and though I’m not a man I like to think

  I am a sailor, with a waxed moustache like his

  whose curled-up ends provide

  an occupation for our nervous hands,

  twirling it so as not to betray

  with a squint or smirk his sympathies,

  which lie with the murderer Princip.

  Who shot the Archduke in Sarajevo, where

  it took me a long time in the assassination museum,

  reading Cyrillic via the osmotic method

  of translation, before I figured out

  Princip was the hero of the place: a person

  could match her feet with his imprinted

  in the sidewalk and pull the trigger of her fingers.

  And enter the fantasy of being The One Who Caused

  The Greater Past, which I could not resist:

  my knuckle crooked, and clicked.

  However I did spare th
e Duchess Sophie.

  Photograph: Grandfather, 1915

  It’s the Bronx, Barretto Point, so the sea

  cannot be far away. But all we have to go on

  is the lone pine in the distance— the rest

  bleached by the chemistry of time. Also

  there’s this young man in the foreground, squatting

  with his forearms balanced on the fulcrum of his knees,

  speaking to what’s disappeared. It is a blur

  resembling a woman with her arm extended,

  urging him to follow. Soon the Great Depression

  will also call him, and for lack of other work

  will send him downstairs to the boiler

  where he’ll nurse the chromosome of sadness

  while his words turn into coal. But he was not really

  down there with the onions and potatoes—

  in a moment, he will follow her

  into the waters off Barretto Point, which will turn his good white shirt

  translucent. Like the translucence he was led by,

  but in this picture he hasn’t risen yet

  to cross the muddy shoreline. He’s still crouched

  in the upland, growing misty with the nebula who touches him,

  misty at the prospect of his likewise turning into mist

  as the camera makes this record of their betrothal.

  Gleaner at the Equinox

  Dusk takes dictation from the houses.

  Sometimes sobs and sometimes screams—

  laughter, too, though it doesn’t settle like the others

  into the hollows of the Virgin Mary’s face.

  In her concrete gown, she’s standing by

  the satellite dish absorbing for the trailer on the corner,

  wearing shoulder pads of Asian pears I stole some of

  before the windfall fell. When the dog

  lifts his leg to soil a withered rose I say Good boy.

  Nightshade vines overtake the house of the widow,

  their flowers turned into yellow berries

  that there are no birds in nature idiot enough

  to mistake for food.

  after Dick Barnes

  Lubricating the Void

  Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper: I can barely pronounce your name

  but have been thinking of you ever since your grease gun

  erupted into space. Causing your tool bag to slip

  beyond the reach of your white glove, when you were attempting

  to repair the space station’s solar wing. Thanks

  for that clump of language— solar wing! One of the clumps

  of magic shat out by our errors. And thanks

  to your helmet camera’s not getting smeared,

  in the inch between your glove and bag— irrevocable inch—

  we see the blue Earth, glowing so lit-up’dly despite the crap

  that we’ve dumped in its oceans, a billion tons of plastic beads,

  precursors to the action figures that come with our Happy Meals.

  Precursors to the modern Christmas tree and handle of the modern ax.

  Precursors to the belts and jackets of the vegans.

  The cleanup crews call them mermaid’s tears, as if a woman

  living in the water would need to weep in polymer

  so that her effort would not be lost/so that there would be proof

  of her lament, say for the great Trash Vortex

  swirling in the current, for the bellies of the albatrosses

  filling up with tears that can’t be broken down.

  For the smell of mildew in the creases of ruptured beach balls,

  for seabirds strangled by what makes the six-pack possible,

  for flip-flops that wash up so consistently alone

  they cause disturbing dreams about one-legged tribes

  (described by Pliny before he sailed across the Bay of Naples,

  into Mount Vesuvius’s toxic spume).

  Dreams logical, Heidemarie, given the fearful data.

  Dreams had by us who live 220 miles below.

  Queasy from our spinning but still holding on,

  with no idea we are so brightly shining.

  Not Housewives, Not Widows

  Bad luck to enter the houses of old women, a commandment

  broken when I entered their stone cottage, two streets over,

  covered in vines that twirled around a rusted swing set

  though they had no child. That they were witches: a conclusion

  come to, given that they wore the clothes of men,

  their wool caps covering their secret hair, their house

  so laced in greenwork that it seemed continuous with the woods

  and its nettles and the nickel in my pocket, which they paid

  for bee balm I tore out of their yard and sold

  back to them, the dirt-wads dangling.

  “Don’t let the birds out,” muttered while I slipped

  into the room with its stone walls, the backdrop

  for a wounded jay who lived in a tin tub rattling with seeds.

  Birdfeed, newspapers, feathers, guano— I saw

  one substance splattering into the next in the life undivided,

  windows open, birds flying in and out.

  They worked their conjurations by feeding chopped meat

  through a dropper, and wiped their hands

  onto their jeans so you could see their long black fingers

  streaking up the whole length of their thighs.

  Freak-Out

  Mine have occurred in empty houses

  down whose dark paneling I dragged my fingernails—

  though big-box stores have also played their parts,

  as well as entrances to indistinct commercial buildings,

  cubes of space between glass yellowing like onion skin,

  making my freak-out obscure.

  Suddenly the head is being held between the hands

  arranged in one of the conventional configurations:

  hands on ears or hands on eyes

  or both stacked on the forehead

  as if to squeeze the wailing out,

  as if the head were being juiced.

  The freak-out wants wide open space,

  though the rules call for containment—

  there are the genuine police to be considered,

  which is why I recommend the empty vestibule

  though there is something to be said for freaking-out

  if the meadow is willing to have you

  facedown in it,

  mouth open to the dry summer dirt.

  When my friend was freaking-out inside my car, I said

  she was sitting in the freak-out’s throne,

  which is love’s throne, too, so many fluids

  from within the body on display

  outside the body until the chin gleams

  like the extended shy head of a snail! Even

  without streetlamps, even in the purplish

  penumbra of the candelabra of the firs.

  My friend was freaking-out about her freak-outs,

  which happened in the produce aisle;

  I said: oh yeah at night, it’s very

  freak-inducing when the fluorescent lights

  arrest you to make their interrogation! Asking

  why you can’t be more like the cabbages,

  stacked precariously

  yet so cool and self-contained,

  or like the peppers who go through life

  untroubled by their freaky whorls.

  What passes through the distillery of anguish

  is the tear without the sting of salt— dripping

  to fill the test tube of the body

  not with monster potion but the H Two… oh, forget it…

  that comes when the self is spent.

  How many battles would remain

  in the fetal pose if the men who rule would rip

  their
wool suits from their chests like girls

  in olden Greece? If the bomberesses

  stopped to lay their brows down on a melon.

  If the torturer would only

  beat the dashboard with his fists.

  Maypole

  Now the tanagers have returned to my dead plum tree—

  they sip the pond through narrow beaks.

  Orange and yellow, this recurrence

  that comes with each year’s baby leaves.

  And if the tree is a church and spring is Sunday,

  then the birds are fancy hats of women breaking into song.

  Or say the tree is an old car whose tank is full,

  then the birds are the girls on a joyride

  crammed in its seats. Or if the tree is the carnival

  lighting the tarmac of the abandoned mall by the freeway,

  then the birds are the men with pocketknives

  who erect its Ferris wheel.

  Or say the tree is the boat that chugs into port

  to fill its hold and deck with logs,

  then the birds are the Russian sailors who

  rise in the morning in the streets where they’ve slept,

  rubbing their heads and muttering

  these words that no one understands.

  Matins

  Every morning I put on my father’s shirt

  whose sleeves have come unraveled—

  the tag inside the collar though

  is strangely unabraded, it says

  Traditionalist

  one hundred per cent cotton

  made in Mauritius

  Which suddenly I see is a haiku

  containing the requisite syllables and even

  a seasonal image

  if you consider balmy Mauritius

  with its pineapples and sugarcane.

  And this precision sends me off

  down the dirt road of my fantasy

  wherein my father searched

  throughout the store to find this shirt

  to send an arrow from before the grave

  to exit on the other side of it,

  the way Bashō wrote his death poem:

  On a journey, ill

  my dream goes wandering

  over withered fields

  It suits my father to have hunted down

  a ready-made for his own poem,

  not having much of an Eastern sensibility,

  having been stationed in China during the war and hating it

  despite the natural beauty of Kunming.

  They say a man dies when the last person

  with a memory of him dies off, or maybe

  he dies when his last shirt falls to ruin. Now

  its cuffs show the dirty facing all the way around

  and a three-inch strip of checkered flannel dangles down

  into my breakfast cereal:

  I have debated many days but

  here it goes—