Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones

by Lucia Perillo

  the puppeteers stood right out in the open.

  Yet how silently they moved, how easy

  a thing they were to pretend we couldn’t see.

  Foley

  It is Harrison Ford who just saved the world,

  but when he walks down a dirt road toward the ultralarge sun

  what sound like his boots are really bricks being drudged

  through a boxful of coffee beans. And the mare you’ve seen

  clopping along those nineteenth-century cobbles —

  she’s a coconut struck by a ball-peen hammer.

  And the three girls riding in the hansom,

  where the jouncing rustles their silk-and-bone:

  that’s a toothbrush moving across birchbark.

  Even the moment when one kickboxer’s perfect body

  makes contact with the other kickboxer’s perfect body

  has nothing to do with kickboxing, or bodies,

  but the concrete colliding with the abstract of perfection,

  which molts into a leather belt spanking a side of beef.

  This is the problem with movies:

  go to enough of them and pretty soon the world

  starts sounding wrongly synced against itself: e.g.,

  last night when I heard a noise below my bedroom window

  that sounded like the yowl a cat would make

  if its tongue were being yanked backward out its ass.

  Pain, I thought. Help, I thought,

  so at two a.m. I went outside with a flashlight

  and found a she-cat corkscrewed to a tom,

  both of them humped and quivering where the beam flattened

  against the grass whose damp was already wicking

  through my slippers. Aaah… love, I thought,

  or some distantly cousined feline analogue of love,

  or the feline analogue of the way love came out of the radio

  in certain sixties pop songs that had the singer keening

  antonyms: how can something so right feel so wrong,

  so good hurt so bad… you know what I’m talking about.

  And don’t you think it’s peculiar:

  in the first half of the sixties they made the black girl-groups

  sing with white accents and in the second half of the sixties

  they made the white girl-groups sing with black accents,

  which proves that what you hear is always

  some strange alchemy of what somebody thinks you’ll pay for

  and what you expect. Love in particular

  it seems to me we’ve never properly nailed down

  so we’ll know it when we hear it coming, the way

  screaming “Fire!” means something to the world.

  I remember this guy who made noises against my neck

  that sounded like when after much tugging on a jar lid

  you stick a can opener under its lip—that little tsuck.

  At first I thought this must be

  one of love’s least common dialects, though later

  when I found the blue spots all over I realized

  it was malicious mischief, it was vandalism, it was damage.

  Everybody has a story about the chorus of these,

  love’s faulty hermeneutics: the muffler in retreat

  mistaken for the motor coming, the declaration

  of loathing construed as the minor reproach;

  how “Babe, can I borrow five hundred bucks?”

  gets dubbed over “Goodbye, chump”—of course,

  of course, and you slap your head but it sounds funny,

  not enough sizzle, not enough snap. If only

  Berlitz had cracked the translations or we had conventions

  like the international code of semaphores;

  if only some equivalent of the Captain Midnight decoder ring

  had been muscled across the border. As it has

  for my friend who does phone sex

  because it’s a job that lets her keep at her typewriter all day,

  tapping out poems. Somehow she can work

  both sides of her brain simultaneously, the poem

  being what’s really going on and the sex being what sounds

  like what’s going on; the only time she stops typing

  is when she pinches her cheek away from her gums,

  which is supposed to sound like oral sex

  though she says it’s less that it really sounds like oral sex

  than that these men have established a pact, a convention

  that permits them to believe it sounds like oral sex.

  When they know

  it’s a woman pinching her cheek and not a blow job,

  it’s a telephone call and not a blow job,

  it’s a light beam whistling down a fiber, for god’s sake,

  and not a blow job. Most days I’m amazed

  we’re not all schizophrenics, hearing voices

  that have been edited out of what calls to us

  from across the fourth wall. I’ve heard

  that in To Have and Have Not Lauren Bacall’s singing

  comes from the throat of a man; also that Bart Simpson is really

  a middle-aged woman; and last week not once but twice

  I heard different women wailing

  in public parking lots, the full throttle

  of unrestrained grief, and both times I looked straight at them

  and pretended nothing unusual was going on,

  as though what I was hearing were only the sound of air

  shrieking through the spoiler on someone’s Camaro.

  That’s also part of the pact my friend’s talking about,

  not to offer condolence, not to take note.

  You don’t tell the men they’re sorry creatures,

  you don’t ask the women what went wrong.

  If you’re being mugged or raped or even killed

  you have to scream “Fire!” instead of “Help!”

  to get someone to help you. Though soon, if not already,

  all the helpers will have caught on

  and then you’ll have to start screaming something else,

  like that you’ve spotted Bacall or Harrison Ford on the street,

  Bart Simpson even—no wait a minute, he’s not real,

  though I remember a time when even the president talked about him

  as if he were human. It’s not the sleaziness

  of phone sex I bristle at, but rather the way it assists

  the world in becoming imprecise

  about what is real and what is not, what is a blow job

  and what is only my friend jimmying her finger

  in her mouth or making a sucky noise

  against the back of her hand. Which is oddly exactly

  how the professor of the ornithology class I took my junior year

  taught us to lure birds in, because birds

  would think these were the sounds of other birds.

  And in that other life of mine,

  when bird-watching was something I did for a living,

  I remember packing high into the mountains

  before the snow melted, when the trail couldn’t be followed,

  so mine would be the only soul for miles.

  One reason I went up there was because at sundown

  when the wind climbed the backs of the mountains

  along with the spreading violet light,

  you could hear the distinct murmuring that the Indians said

  was the collective voices of the dead. And I’d lie there,

  just my sleeping bag and pad set down on snow,

  and I’d look hard at the sky, as though

  the wind were something I could see if I looked hard enough,

  listening equally hard to convince myself

  about the voices of the dead, though always

  I was tugged back from true belief

  by the one side of my brain that insiste
d: Wind.

  And also I remember

  how once at the trailhead a man popped out of his motor home

  and pointed a camcorder at me, asking

  where I was going, what I was doing—though of course,

  alone, I wasn’t going to say.

  But even as I turned away, I heard

  the whir of the movie being made

  and the man making up his own narration: see this little girl,

  she says she’s going to climb a mountain,

  and briefly I thought about pulling a Trotsky on him

  with my ice ax. But as the New Agers say I

  “let it go,” and I left,

  and he didn’t follow me, and nothing bad ever happened,

  though from time to time I think about strangers watching that movie

  in the man’s living room, his voice overdubbing

  (see this little girl, she says she’s going to climb a mountain)

  the sound of me, of my boots walking.

  Air Guitar

  The women in my family were full of still water;

  they churned out piecework as quietly as glands.

  Plopped in America with only the wrong words

  hobbling their tongues, they liked one thing

  about the sweatshop, the glove factory,

  and it was this: you didn’t have to say much.

  All you had to do was stitch the leather fingers

  until you came up with a hand; the rest

  they kept tucked to their ribs like a secret book.

  Why, was not said, though it doesn’t seem natural

  the way these women ripped the pages out

  and chewed them silently and swallowed — where

  is the ur-mother holding court beside her soup pot,

  where are Scheherazade and the rest of those Persians

  who wove their tragedies in rugs?

  Once I tutored a Cambodian girl: each week

  I rolled the language like a newspaper and used it

  to club her on the head. In return she spoke

  a mangled English that made all her stories sad,

  about how she’d been chased through the jungle

  by ruthless henchmen of Pol Pot; for months

  she and her sisters mother grandmothers aunts

  lived in the crowns of trees and ate what grew there

  and did not touch down. When she told the story,

  the way her beautiful and elaborately painted face

  would loosen at each corner of her eyes and mouth

  reminded me of a galosh too big for its shoe.

  It was rubbery, her face, like the words

  that sometimes haunt me with their absence,

  when I wake up gargling the ghost of one

  stuck like a wild hair far back in my mouth.

  This morning it took me till noon to fish out

  cathexis, and even then I did not know

  what this meant until I looked it up.

  As it was not until I met her sister

  that I learned what the girl was telling me

  was not the story she was telling: there were

  no women in trees, no myrmidons of Comrade Pot,

  their father was, is, had always been,

  a greengrocer in Texas. Cathexis:

  fixing emotional energy on some object

  or idea — say the jungle, or the guy

  getting rubbery with a guitar that isn’t there.

  Yet see how he can’t keep from naming

  the gut that spills above his belt Lucille —

  as music starts to pour from his belly

  and the one hiked-up corner of his lip. This

  is part of the legend we tell ourselves about the tribe,

  that men are stuffed and full to bursting

  with their quiet, that this is why they’ve had to go

  into the wilderness, searching for visions

  that would deliver up their names. While women

  stayed in the villages, with language at their center

  like a totem log tipped lengthwise to the ground.

  And they chipped at it and picked at it,

  making a hole big enough to climb in, a dugout

  in which they all paddled off to hunt up

  other villages, the other members of the tribe.

  And when the men returned they found no one home,

  just cold fire pits that would not speak — an old

  old forsakenness they bring to the bar stools

  while the jukebox music washes over each of them

  like a tricolored light wheel on a silver tree.

  Though someone might argue that none of whatever

  I’ve just said is true: it was men who made boats

  while the women sat clumped in private guilds,

  weaving their baskets tight enough to trap

  the molecules of water. You can see

  that the trail from here to the glove factory

  would not be terribly long or hard to read,

  and how it might eventually lead to the railroad flat

  where, alone at night for many years, my grandmother

  works deep into her privacy with a common nail

  that she scratches across the backs of copper sheets.

  She is making either the hands clasped in prayer

  or the three-quarter profile of Jesus.

  As far as I know there is nothing

  the radio can play now that will make her sing.

  Pomegranate

  How charitable to call it fruit, when almost nothing

  inside it can be eaten. Just the gelatin

  that thinly rinds the unpalatable seed.

  The rest of it all pith, all bitter,

  hardly a meal, even for a thin girl. But food enough,

  at least in the myth, to be what ties Persephone

  half the year to hell — though it’s never clear

  this future isn’t the one she wants,

  her other choice being daylight, sure,

  but also living with her mother. In some versions

  she willingly eats the tart red seeds, signing on

  with the underground gods and their motorbikes

  and their dark shades. Oh... all right —

  no motorbikes. And “eats” is not right either.

  But what, then — “sucks”? “Strains the seeds through her teeth”?

  It would have made more sense for Hades to tempt her

  with something full of juice: a grapefruit, say,

  or peach. But only a girl like Eve

  could be so blank a slate as to ruin herself

  with a meal as salutary as the apple. Give her instead

  the kind of nourishment that takes its own

  equipment to extract, like the pomegranate or the spiny

  asteroid of the Chinese chestnut. Or the oyster,

  from which, between the shell and shucking knife,

  there is no exiting unscathed: a delicacy, we say,

  though the hand hangs out its little flag of skin.

  But doesn’t the blood that salts the mouth somehow

  make the meat taste sweeter? And if she’d turned

  toward us in the moonlight with the red pulp

  mottling her teeth: wouldn’t our innards

  have started to sing? I know that’s what mine did

  those nights when our girl got called out of the junipers

  where the rest of us hid her — all it took

  was his deep voice, and she stepped out.

  Then came sounds that, instead of carrying words,

  carried punctuation’s weight: the exclamation

  when she had the air knocked out, and the question mark

  that was her sudden inswept breath.

  And the parentheses when time went on forever,

  when there was no sound because he’d got her by the throat.

  Her boyfriend seemed to like our
watching, his imperiousness

  lecturing on what we didn’t know: the jelly

  sluiced inside the mouth or the seeds

  rasped across the palate… until it ended sometimes

  when he strolled her off, steering

  as if she were the boat and her skinny arm

  were its tiller. But just as often

  he’d have somewhere to get to, or lose interest

  as if so much activity had pushed him to the brink of sleep,

  and that’s how she came back to us kneeling

  in our patch of stunted trees, whose evergreenery

  pressed its crewelwork in our haunches.

  Even by mere moonlight it was hard

  not to see the art in what he’d done:

  her lip iridescent, her chin gleaming

  like the hemisphere of a tarnished spoon.

  And didn’t the leaves seem brighter then,

  if it can be said that junipers have leaves?

  As our hard panting rattled through

  …but no. Stop here. No of course it can’t be said.

  Crash Course in Semiotics

  1.

  “Naked woman surrounded by police”: that’s one way

  to start the poem. But would she mean anything

  devoid of her context, in this case a lushly

  late-August deciduous forest, some maple,

  mostly oak? She carries no prop—for example,

  no bike chain, which the cops could be sawing

  from the tree trunk that she’s wedded to her body.

  But let’s start with her pure, and untranslated,

  as the famous cartoon of the door is a mystery

  until we post the word ladies at a point that would be

  four feet up from the ground if this door

  were not drawn two inches tall—it’s us,

  you see, who make believe it corresponds

  to a “true-life” human door. Does it help

  if I say the naked woman is “really” my true-

  life friend, she of the tangled dago surname

  we don’t need to get into here? And if I say next

  that she has been swimming — in Lake Tiorati —

  2.

  you can see how straightaway the tangling subdivides

  into (a) where the hell is Lake Tiorati?

  and (b) why naked? — to the last let me answer

  that it’s 1978 and she is twenty; at college