On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

by Lucia Perillo

  snip

  and am overcome by an Asian wash of sadness.

  Because the washer spins so violently, like time—

  perhaps its agitations can be better withstood

  with the last-memory theory, which means that a dead man

  reposes longest in the toddlers that he knew,

  which often are not many,

  children being afraid of old men,

  what with their sputum-clearing rasps

  and their propensity for latching on to cheeks,

  though my father was not much of a child-cheek-pincher,

  not that he had anything against them;

  he had a grandson he tolerated

  crawling under the table at La Manda’s

  where between forkfuls of scungilli

  as his kidneys chugged with insufficient vim,

  he composed his other death poem,

  the one that came in his own words, it went

  Soon I must cross

  the icy sidewalk—

  help. There goes my shoe

  Black Transit

  Trees bare. Days short. And at dusk

  crows pour through the sky in strands.

  From a point in the east too small

  to feed your eye on, they pop

  into being as sharp dark stars, and then

  are large, and then are here, pouring west.

  Something chilling about it,

  though they are birds like any birds.

  What’s fishy is the orchestration, all of them

  with a portion of the one same mind: they fly

  as if the path were laid, as if

  there were runnels in the air, molding

  their way to the roost. Whose location

  no one seems to know— if they did,

  you’d think there would be chitchat

  in the market about the volume

  of their screams, as if women were being

  dragged by the hair through the woods

  at night. But everybody keeps mum—

  it seems we’re in cahoots with them

  without knowing what’s the leverage

  they possess (though we can feel it)

  to extract from us this pact, this vow.

  Heronry

  Now my body has become so stylish in the ancient way—didn’t Oedipus

  also have a bloated foot? Yes,

  I remember him tied by the ankle in a tree, after his father heard the terrible

  prophecy and left him hanging

  for the animals to peck and lap, same way the dog likes to lap my bloated foot

  when I take off the special socks

  meant to squeeze it down. He likes to eat my epidermal cells before they fly

  off on the air that moves on through

  the tallest trees one valley south, where great blue herons build their nests

  and ride on small twigs up—then gently

  do their legs glide down my binoculars’ field of view. The twigs they ride on

  never crack; how do they calculate

  the tensile strength of cellulose versus their hollow bones? I thought of this

  at the hospital cafeteria

  as I stared down an oldish woman’s half-cubit of shanklebone, exposed

  between her sock and slack: it was

  oldish skin I lapped until scowled at by her companion, who reached to the hem

  of her pant-leg and for the sake of what

  rule of decorum gently pulled it down?

  Les Dauphins

  The dogs of the childless are barely dogs.

  From tufted pillows, they rule the kingdom.

  They’d stand for their portraits

  in velvet suits, if they had suits—

  holding hats with giant feathers.

  And ousting the question: who loves the dog more?

  the question becomes: who does the dog love?

  The woman says: you are the one who plays him

  a drum, you tap the anthem on his head.

  No, the man says, you debone him the hen,

  you tie the bow of his cravat.

  The dogs of the childless sleep crosswise in bed,

  from human hip to human hip—a canine wire

  completes the circuit. The man says: I wonder

  what runs through his head

  when he squeaks and snorls all through his dream?

  And the woman says: out

  of the dream, I’m in his dream,

  riding the hunt in my lovely saddle.

  When the masters are gone, the dogs of the childless

  stand in the mirror with swords on their hips.

  They’d stand for their portraits with dogs of their own

  if we were kings, if they weren’t dogs.

  Rashomon

  Light passing through the leaves obliterates the subtitles

  when the thief overtakes the swordsman

  and forces his bride to submit. This is why

  I need a new 42-inch flat-screen TV—

  so I can read the dialogue of foreign films

  that will improve me, though frankly it is horrible

  to see the swordsman tied up and to watch him watch

  the change in his wife’s fingers

  on the thief’s (somewhat doughy) back. First

  it looks as if she’s fighting him, but then

  she seems to pull him close,

  saying Now I am stained and must be killed or

  How do whales strain such tiny krill—these problems

  of interpretation can be solved by money:

  we need larger words. I have not abandoned words

  even if with trepidation I now enter

  the kind of store where they sell plastic polygons

  that hum and blink. As the swordsman’s wife

  enters the forest on her pony, her trepidation draped

  with a veil that renders even the biggest tv powerless

  to show much of her face. But she shows the thief her foot

  in its fancy flip-flop: that’s what rouses him

  to rape her in the leafy grove, I’ll say what I saw

  in the plainest words. I am not asking to be forgiven

  for desiring 1080p, though I am asking

  whether or not she asked for it: you’d think

  we would have laid that one to rest (it seems

  so strident, air-lifted from the 1970s

  when I did not watch tv and also called myself a womyn—

  a word it’s hard to dress in a kimono) but apparently

  we will never. At his trial, the thief (Toshiro Mifune)

  sits wigwam-style in tethers and laughs maniacally

  as he tells his version, though in somebody else’s version

  she’s the maniac who laughs. We ask, but the new machines

  refuse to say much more than this: that everyone

  will get their chance to laugh and everyone

  their chance to wield the knife—

  be careful, it is sharp and growing

  sharper, the more I spend.

  Stargazer

  When first I was given the one lily

  chaperoned by two green pods,

  I strapped myself in like a cosmonaut

  to absorb the whoosh of seeing

  its pods open one by one.

  Because what mind cooked up such extravagance,

  spot speckle pinkstripe smudge—

  someone call a fire truck

  somebody call a bomb squad

  somebody call a pharmacist

  for a Valium prescription.

  Because the beauty of the world is soon to perish;

  everything is burning up too fast—

  lily number two goes off like a bottle rocket, leaving

  the bloom and withering on the same stiff stalk

  and the heart torn between them as the petals drop.

  Oh, I might have asked for a simple daisy, something />
  to inflict a subtler vanishing…

  without all this ocular pyromania

  and the long-bones-dressed-up-in-a-coffin

  scent. Plus there’s one pod yet to detonate,

  which the yellow pollen grains are trying to defuse

  by lying scattered on the table,

  precisely scattered on the wooden table

  in a manner calibrated to this trapezoid of winter light.

  The Unturning

  for Ben S., 1936–2010

  My friend said: write about the dog in The Odyssey—

  four hundred pages in. I found him lying on a dungheap

  where ticks sipped his blood, though in his youth

  he’d taken down wild animals, eager to kill

  for a man the gods favored! Who comes back

  in disguise; you expect the dog to give him away

  with a lick or a yip, but this is not what happens.

  Instead we’re told that “death closed down his eyes,”

  the instant he saw his master after twenty years away.

  And I wondered if my friend had played a trick—

  setting me up with this dog who does not do much

  but die. When the gods turn away, what can we do

  but await their unturning? That means: don’t think

  that after so many years of having such a hard pillow,

  the dog wasn’t grateful. But I wonder

  if, for the sake of the shape of the plot,

  the author ought to have let him remain

  for another line or two, if only to thump again his tail.

  Wild Birds Unlimited

  Because the old feeder feeds nothing

  but squirrels, who are crafty and have learned

  how to hang so it swings sideways until

  gravity takes the seed—I bumble down

  to this store of bird knickknacks and

  lensware for the geeks, and while

  the clerk is ringing up my Mini

  Bandit Buster ($29.95), spring-loaded

  to close the seed-holes when a heavy animal alights,

  I read a pamphlet about bird-feeding, which I had not thought

  was complicated, but turns out

  is. Yes I bought the costly mixture

  —not the cheap stuff full of milo—

  which the birds kick to the ground, where it becomes

  an aggregate of shit and chaff.

  But I’d not known you must sweep it up

  so as not to spread the pathogens, and space

  your feeders far apart and dump

  the seed each week and clean the feeder tube with bleach.

  And you should whitewash the windows of your home

  so the birds won’t crash—you’ll live in twilight

  but your conscience will be clear. Otherwise

  it’s best not to feed the birds

  at all: your help will only kill them, has killed them,

  I killed them says Wild Birds Unlimited—thanks,

  now let me tell you that your wind chimes

  turn this place into a gong-tormented sea.

  Outside, it’s just another shop in the strip mall;

  used to be that this place was a grove

  of cedars where I knelt in the purplebrown duff

  while something holy landed like a lunar rover

  on my shoulder. But listen

  to what sings in the grove’s bright stead—

  computer chips provide what you would hear here

  if they weren’t—mechanical birds

  on plastic boughs, always flowering.

  Bats

  Light leaves the air like silty water

  through a filterpaper sieve:

  there is a draft created by its exodus

  that you might think that if you rode

  you too could slip away quite easily.

  Is this why they call to mind the thought of death?

  Squeak squeak, their song: I want to go

  but I am stuck here, it is a mistake

  being incarnate; I should be made

  of the same substance as the dark.

  If they must stay, like us they will be governed

  by their hungers, pursuit

  without rest. What you see in their whirling

  is not purity of spirit. Only appetite,

  infernal appetite—driving them, too, on.

  Autothalamium

  On my wedding night I drove the white boat,

  its steering wheel a full yard wide. The dress

  bellied out behind me like a sail

  as I gripped the lacquered wood

  and circuited the bay. The poem

  by Akhmatova having already

  been read, the calamari and cake

  already eaten, I stood alone

  in the wheelhouse while my friends

  danced to the balalaikas outside

  on the deck. I could not speak

  for the groom, who left me

  to the old motor’s growl

  and the old boards’ groan; I also

  couldn’t speak for the moon

  because I feared diverging

  from my task to look. Instead I stuck

  my eyes to the water, whose toxins shined

  with a phosphor that I plowed and plundered.

  And no matter what has happened since,

  the years and the dead,

  the sadness of the bound-to-happen,

  the ecstasy of the fragile moment,

  I know one night I narrowed my gaze

  and attended to my captaining, while the sea

  gave me more serious work than either love or speech.

  Red Hat

  I followed your red stocking hat

  down the river of summer snow

  until you carved the turn that stopped us both

  with a spray of crystals. A prosthetic leg

  lay on the ground, wearing a red

  running shoe; we almost took it

  to the Lost and Found, but skiing on,

  we found more legs

  perplexed the mountain. Leg

  with thermos, leg with scarf, tableaux

  with legs like bowling pins

  struck down, though some were propped

  erect, against a rock. Art installation

  or object lesson?—first the body loses,

  then it loses what it puts in place

  of what it loses?—I thought

  Mount Hood had come to life

  to hammer this in. But I kept on

  after your red hat and soon was overtaken

  by one-legged men, a human wind

  I whirled among for just a human minute.

  Below, I saw them swallow you, then leave

  you with the mountain shadowed on your back,

  your red hat wagging, happily, it seemed,

  despite the tons of rock you wore.

  This Red T-shirt

  was a gift from Angus, came with his new Harley

  which no ladies deigned to perch their buttocks on

  and was therefore sold minus the shirt—

  net cost: three thousand dollars, I wear the money

  in my sleep. The black braid flowing from the man

  herding dice at the Squaxins’ Little Creek Casino

  cost me two hundred thirty-five, well worth it

  for the word croupier. Work seven months on a poem,

  then you tear it up, this does not pencil out

  especially for my mother who ate potatoes

  every day from 1935–41. Who went to the famous

  Jackson Pollock show after the war—sure, she was a rube

  from across the Harlem River, snickering

  at the swindle of those dribbles until death squelched the supply

  and drove the prices up. I’ve known men

  who gave up houses worth half a million just to see

  the back of someone whom they once bou
ght diamonds.

  And I’ve known women to swallow diamonds

  just to amplify the spectacle of their being flushed.

  The Gutenberg Bible—okay, I get that:

  five-point-four million dollars for a book of poems

  written by God on the skin of a calf. A hundred years ago

  the Squaxins could tell you easily

  who the rich man was. He’d be dressed in a red robe

  made of epaulets from redwing blackbird wings.

  The Wolves of Illinois

  When I stopped along the road and climbed the platform that the wildlife people built, I saw the dead grass moving. A darker gold that broke free from the pale gold of the field.

  “Wolves,” said the man who stood beside me on the platform. On his other side stood his wife and children, I assumed, dressed as if they’d come from church,

  a boy and girl, her scalp crosshatched with partings from her braids. Note that this is my way of announcing they were black

  or African American, I am shy not only of the terminology but of the subject altogether

  compounded by the matter of words, black being strong

  if not so precise a descriptor—

  and my being torn about the language makes me nervous from the start. “Look at the wolves,” he told his children

  before dropping a quarter in the scope, which I didn’t need because I had my own binoculars

  and know the names and field marks of the birds

  (like the white rump of the marsh hawk),

  so I include “the white rump of the marsh hawk” as it flies over the field.

  “Those are coyotes,” I said

  with pity for the man’s foolishness? is there a correlation between my knowledge and my pity?

  (an inside joke: the marsh hawk’s having been renamed the northern harrier,

  though marsh hawk is stronger).

  Plus what about the man’s pity for the white girl with coyote in her mouth

  — coyote in two syllables, the rancher’s pronunciation,

  when wolf is stronger. I wondered whether he was saving face before his family when he said, “No, those are wolves,”

  or did he only want his kids to feel the dangerous elation of the word?

  I could not tell because they did not look at me, they who had come from praying to a God in whom I don’t believe, though I am less smug about that not-belief

  (could be wrong, I oftentimes suspect)

  than I am about the wolves. Because I know the wolves were coyotes;

  the wolves were coyotes

  and so I said, “There are no wolves in Illinois.”

  “No, those are wolves,” the man said, turning toward his wife who offered me her twisted smile, freighted with pity or not I couldn’t tell, the pity directed toward me another thing I couldn’t tell, or toward her husband

  the believer in wolves

  (at least he was sticking by them, having staked his claim).