Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones

by Lucia Perillo

  where he went down again like a duffel bag full of earth

  in front of the reception desk where I was sitting.

  I watched the one male nurse turn pale as ash

  when he knelt to certify the heartbeat

  of this man whose lips were blue and wet.

  The other nurse took the group to the auditorium,

  saying James isn’t feeling very well right now.

  James is sick. Get away from him. Then I heard

  the dopey music of the automated slide show

  behind those doors from which she never reappeared.

  The male nurse was too young to leave stranded

  with a man down on the smooth wood floor:

  his cheek still velvet, his dark fingers

  worrying the valleys of the man’s white wrist.

  He’s okay, he’s breathing, as the man’s skin

  turned gray, his mouth open, a cherry sore

  at either edge. I don’t remember what I did at first,

  I must have puttered off to perform some

  stupid task that would seem useful —

  gathering premoistened towelettes

  or picking up the phone while the nurse repeated

  He’s okay, he’s breathing. But the colors

  got worse until nothing could spare me

  from having to walk my hand in the crease

  of the man’s blue throat, where his carotid

  should have pulsed. Nothing.

  I said You breathe for him and I’ll compress,

  and for a while we worked together like a clumsy

  railroad handcar, me humping at arm’s length

  over the ribs, the nurse sealing his lips around

  the man’s scabbed mouth, while yellow mucus

  drained from James’s eyes and nose and throat.

  Each time the nurse pressed his mouth to the man’s

  like a reluctant lover, the stink of cud

  was on his lips when he lifted up. Sometimes

  he had to hold his face out to the side,

  to catch a few breaths of good salt air.

  Until he was no longer able to choke back his gut

  and asked whether I would trade places with him.

  For a moment I studied the man’s staved chest,

  which even my small knuckles had banged to jelly,

  then the yellow pulp that flecked the nurse’s lips,

  that sour, raw smell from their mix of spit.

  And I said: No. I don’t think I could...

  It’s strange what we do with the dead

  — burning them or burying them in earth —

  when the body always tries to revert to water.

  Later, a doctor called to say the man’s heart

  had exploded like a paper sack: death hooked him

  before he even hit the floor. So everything we did

  was useless — we might as well have banged a drum

  and blown into a horn. And notice how I just said “we” —

  as though the nurse and I had somehow married

  spirits in a pact of gambled blood, when in truth

  the nurse, like the man, rode off in an ambulance,

  the man for a pointless go-round in the ER, the nurse

  for a shot of gamma globulin, while I stood

  in the parking lot, picking lint off my shirt.

  End of story. Except that since then James

  has followed me, showing up sometimes at the house

  to read my gas meter, sometimes behind the counter

  where I ask him what I owe. No surprise then

  that I’ve made my life with another James,

  who swears my biggest defect is still the limits

  on what I’ll bring myself to do for someone else.

  I know there are people who’ll cut out their kidney

  to replace a friend’s cankered one, people

  who’ll rush into burning buildings to save the lives

  of strangers. But every time I ponder selflessness

  I hear the beats of my heart, that common loon,

  most primitive of birds. Then my life seems most

  like a naked, frail thing that must be protected,

  and I have suddenly become its mother, paddling

  with my own life saddled on my back.

  There’s one last thing I didn’t mention —

  when I refused to breathe for the dying James

  what happened next was that I began to laugh:

  a thin laugh, nervous laugh… but loud enough

  to drift outside, where it stood on the hill

  and creaked its wings a minute before lifting—

  over the levees, across those shallowest of waters.

  Needles

  So first there’s the chemo: three sticks, once a week,

  twenty-six weeks.

  Then you add interferon: one stick, three times a week,

  forever.

  And then there’s the blood tests. How many blood tests?

  (Too many to count.)

  Add all the sticks up and they come down to this: either

  your coming out clean

  or else… well, nobody’s talking

  about the B-side,

  an or else that plows through your life like a combine

  driven at stock-car speed,

  shucking the past into two piles: things that mattered

  and things that didn’t.

  And the first pile looks so small when you think of

  everything you haven’t done —

  never seeing the Serengeti or Graceland, never running

  with the bulls in Spain.

  Not to mention all the women you haven’t done yet!—

  and double that number of breasts.

  Okay—

  you’ve got a woman, a good woman, make no mistake.

  But how come you get just one woman when you’re getting

  many lifetimes’ worth of sticks?

  Where is the justice in that? You feel like someone

  who’s run out of clean clothes

  with laundry day still half a week away; all those women

  you tossed in the pile

  marked things that didn’t matter, now you can’t help but

  drag them out.

  Like the blond on trail crew who lugged the chain saw

  on her shoulder up a mountain

  and bucked up chunks of blighted trees — how could you

  have forgotten

  how her arms quaked when the saw whined and the muscles

  went liquid in her quads,

  or the sweaty patch on her chest where a mosaic formed

  of shiny flies and moss?

  Or that swarthy-haired dancer, her underpants hooked

  across her face like the Lone Ranger,

  the one your friends paid to come to the table, where

  she pawed and made you blush:

  How come yer getting married when you could be muff-diving

  every night?

  At college they swore it was John Dewey, they swore

  by the quadruped Rousseau,

  and it took cancer to step up and punch your gut

  before you figured

  that all along immortal truth’s one best embodiment

  was just

  some sixteen-year-old table-dancing on a forged ID

  at Ponders Corners.

  You should have bought a red sports car, skimmed it under

  the descending arms at the railroad crossing,

  the blond and brunette beside you under its moonroof

  and everything smelling of leather —

  yes yes—this has been your flaw: how you have always

  turned away from the moment

  your life was about to be stripped so the bone of it

  lies bare and glittering.

  You even tried wearing a White Sox cap to bed but its bill

  nearly pu
t your wife’s eye out.

  So now you’re left no choice but going capless, scarred;

  you must stand erect;

  you must unveil yourself as a bald man in that most

  treacherous darkness.

  You remember the first night your parents left town, left

  you home without a sitter.

  Two friends came over and one of them drove the Mercury

  your dad had parked stalwartly

  in the drive (you didn’t know how yet) — took it down

  to some skinny junkie’s place

  in Wicker Park, cousin of a friend of a cousin, friend

  of a cousin of a friend,

  what did it matter but that his name was Sczabo.

  Sczabo! —

  as though this guy were a skin disease, or a magician

  about to make doves appear.

  What he did was tie off your friends with a surgical tube,

  piece of lurid chitterling

  smudged with grease along its length. Then needle, spoon —

  he did the whole bit,

  it was just like in the movies, only your turn turned you

  chicken (or were you defiant? — )

  Somebody’s got to drive home, and that’s what you did

  though you’d never

  made it even as far as the driveway’s end before your dad

  put his foot over the transmission hump

  to forestall some calamity he thought would compromise

  the hedges.

  All the way back to Evanston you piloted the Mercury

  like General Montgomery in his tank,

  your friends huddled in the backseat, spines coiled,

  arms cradled to their ribs —

  as though each held a baby being rocked too furiously

  for any payoff less than panic.

  It’s the same motion your wife blames on some blown-out

  muscle in her chest

  when at the end of making love she pitches violently,

  except instead of saying

  something normal like god or jesus she screams ow! ow!

  and afterward,

  when you try sorting out her pleasure from her pain,

  she refuses you the difference.

  Maybe you wish you took the needle at Sczabo’s place —

  what’s one more stick

  among the many you’ll endure, your two friends not such

  a far cry from being women,

  machines shaking and arching in the wide backseat

  as Sczabo’s doves appeared —

  or so you thought then, though now you understand

  all the gestures the body will employ

  just to keep from puking. Snow was damping the concrete

  and icing the trees,

  a silence stoppered in the back of your friends’ throats

  as you let the Mercury’s wheel pass

  hand over hand, steering into the fishtails, remembering

  your dad’s admonition:

  when everything goes to hell the worst you can do

  is hit the brakes.

  Monorail

  Seattle, at the old World’s Fair

  He stands by the helm, his face full of blue

  from the buildings at twilight, his hand

  knuckled around a metal pole that keeps him

  from falling, as he flies past the vaults

  of startled mannequins, the red ohs of their lips.

  Christmas lights are also falling

  through the windshield, onto his chest:

  right side green, left side red —

  dark then back again.

  Wait… my father is not moving yet:

  no one has claimed the worn leather throne.

  But his thoughts are moving, wondering

  whether movement is the same as growing old

  in the province of space, not time. Inside his shoes,

  his toes are as blue as the city streets,

  and the drum in his chest, his red-lit chest,

  is growing dim. He knows the train he’s about to ride

  has one rail: no steering, no turns.

  And the only skill is in the brake.

  The brake. His lips roll over the words:

  the dead man’s brake. And a small boy

  — come to ride up front — hears him,

  tugs my father’s coat and asks:

  Hey mister, are you the driver of this train?

  Cairn for Future Travel

  I was young for a minute, but then I got old.

  Already the black cane stands by

  the threshold, already my feet are flowerpots

  in thick black shoes. So not long now

  before I will have what follows:

  a spidery hairnet to circle my scalp, a hand

  callused enough to whack your ear. And with them,

  the deep wisdom of Sicilian great-aunts:

  how to plumb for the melon’s ripeness, how

  to stand the loaves upright in my twine sack.

  And you, are you ready? Have you brushed

  your brown suitcoat and hat? Have you counted

  your mahogany chessmen and oiled the zipper

  on their leather case? Have you filled

  your sack of crumbs for the pigeons?

  In the park, men are waiting, raking

  the bocce-court sand. And as for this second-floor

  window where I shake my fist: soon you will learn

  to feign deafness, fishing the silver ball

  up from your loose, deep pocket.

  from

  The Oldest Map with the Name America

  (1999)

  The printing press could disseminate, but it could not retrieve.

  To his annoyance, Waldseemüller himself learned the fantastic,

  irreversible reach of this new technology. When Waldseemüller

  changed his mind and decided that after all Amerigo Vespucci

  should not be credited as the true discoverer of the New World,

  it was too late.… The printed messages advertising America

  were already diffused into a thousand places and could not

  be recalled.

  DANIEL J. BOORSTIN, THE DISCOVERERS

  Beige Trash

  Who is to blame for there being no tractors

  churning the soil into veils

  to drape over the telling

  where and how I grew, in a suburb

  with no men that I could in good conscience adorn

  with prosthetic limbs or even crushed straw hats?

  Kudzu was something we shouted

  jujitsuing air like the Green Hornet’s sidekick

  whose name still needed some time to ferment

  in those years separating the yellow peril

  from kung-fu mania, before BRUCE LEE

  floated up to the marquee lights.

  Like the stripers you could not eat

  floating on top of the poisonous river,

  to whose bank we never carried our burdens

  and let them weep down into Jersey.

  Because surely these words would have profited

  from at least one silo lording over,

  with some earthmoving equipment

  parked nearby in a nest of wire

  belonging to some good old boy named…

  what? Leldon? Lemuel? But sorry:

  in no barn did the whiskey bottles lie

  like Confederate casualties at Appomattox —

  no tent revivals, no cousins with red hair

  and freckled hands, no words as exotic as po’boy

  or chifforobe or muffuletta. Which meant

  we had no means to wrangle Beauty

  into the cathedrals of our mouths,

  though on occasion an ordinary cow

  could make the car’s eight-chambered heart

  stop dead beside a pasture, where none of us

  dared
get out for fear of stampedes or hay fever

  or maybe even fangs hidden behind the lips.

  Call us ignorant: everything we knew poured out

  those two-at-a-time black-and-white TVS —

  one for picture, one for sound — & antlered

  with coat hangers that gave even Hawaii Five-O

  the speckling of constant winter. The snow

  fell like the fur of our fat white dog

  for whom my mother cooked lamb chops every night

  in an attempt to cure its baldness,

  while we dug our fingers in the chopmeat

  before she slapped it into patties.

  Then Star Trek came on. Then for an hour

  the men faded in and out of light.

  And there is nothing about this past

  it does any service to the language to recall:

  Art was what the fire department sold tickets to,

  raising money for the hook and ladder.

  It took place inside the school auditorium,

  where an old Italian couple hid

  by donning black and standing

  just outside the purple spotlight.

  Then music surged that was vaguely familiar

  though we’d fail to lure its elaborate name

  in from the borders of what we knew,

  while the marionette-swan bobbled to its feet

  as if newly born. I can say it now:

  Tchaikovsky. Of course, the whole time

  they worked the sticks and strings,