Lucia Perillo: On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

I had my precinct wrong and went to Garfield Elementary

where the hall monitors would not let me through

because I live on the wrong side of the boundary. I could hear

my neighbors, listening reasonably to one another,

listening even to the man who is my adversary

because he leaves his dog’s crap on the sidewalk’s grassy strip.

If he wants to fly, Peter Pan has to focus very hard on Tinker Bell.

If he is quiet and he concentrates, then he can fly.

The girl who spoke sat in the hallway,

so I asked if she was working on her reading. “No,

she’s autistic those are her socialization cards,” said her mother,

who asked if I would watch her girl (whose name was Terri)

so she (the mother)

could take part in the caucus.

He can fly only when he focuses on Tinker Bell.

He can focus only when he listens.

In the classrooms, my neighbors sat in chairs

that shrank their knee-chin distance pitifully. I heard my adversary

say he didn’t think the candidate looked authentic enough

and that’s how history gets made. Quick

write it down before it slips

too far downstream.

Peter Pan likes to sing and hear Tinker Bell sing.

When he hears Tinker Bell sing, Peter Pan is happy.

In the classroom, something was decided—

I heard the collective exhale of assent

before people filed out, looking giddy and grave. When she returned

I asked Terri’s mother what was up

with the singing, and she said that other children

tormented her girl with songs.

Go tell that to a poet.

It would explain a lot about the current state of the art.

Orpheus sang,

and, like the Beatles, his song made the girls scream

so loud they drowned the song. Then they yelled

See yonder our despiser and tore off his head.

Peter Pan and Tinker Bell like to sing together .

They are very happy when they sing.

You know one girl alone wouldn’t have done it,

and this is not just a matter of strength. There’s a fuse

running from one of us to the other— lucky thing

all that’s in my pocket is this old packet

of moist towelettes

I mistook for a matchbook.

She thanked me, the mother, even though Terri

had been reading her cards to my dog. Note

I carry a blue (biodegradable and perfumed)

plastic crap bag, though it hadn’t been used yet,

there at the school, and I was letting it flap

from the pocket of my red flannel shirt

like the American flag.

Come, my adversary—

let us discuss the warblers.

How sweetly they torment us from the budding trees.

Here the coyote lives in shadows between houses,

feeds by running west to raid the trash behind the store

where they sell food that comes in cans

yesterday expired. Picture it

perching on the dumpster, a corrugated

sheet of metal welded to the straight, its haunch

accruing the imprint of the edge until it pounces,

skittering on the cans. It has tried

to gnaw them open and broken all its teeth.

Bald-flanked, rheumy-eyed, sniffing the wheels

of our big plastic trash carts but too pigeon-

chested to knock them down, scat full of eggshells

from the compost pile. “I am like that, starved,

with dreams of rutting in a culvert’s narrow light—”

we mumble our affinities as we vacate into sleep.

Because we occupy the wrong animal— don’t you too feel it?

Haven’t you stood in the driveway, utterly confused?

Maybe you were taking out the garbage, twisting

your robe into a noose-knot at your throat, when you stopped

fighting the urge to howl, and howled—

and did it bring relief, my friend, however self-deceiving?

I paddled many days to reach the totem poles

not barged off to Vancouver. Tilting in a clearing,

gray and cracked, upholding the clouds,

the grain for a hundred years having risen.

The ghosts of Cumshewa Inlet kept trying to evict me,

but I did not want to leave

because the Haida had left their dead here

and once you step over a human bone while following a deer-path

you want to step over another, unless you are not ruled

by curiosity as I was ruled. Or had already seen a skull

mossy in its entirety, with three holes (eye sockets

+ the nose) + the palate on the duff.

Into which the green teeth bit, the moss

covering it all like luminescent car upholstery,

what do you do if you are just a dumb American,

I can usually figure out how to behave, but require years

to come to my conclusions. Now

the fact the reparations have come due

is being made clear by the photo of the skull

I took when I was young and dumb, this anti-

luck charm emanating green recriminations,

though I notice that I do not take it from the wall.

of those who have drifted through thus far of their allotted

fifty or seventy or ninety years on Earth

with no disasters happening,

whatever had to be given up was given up—

the food at the rehab facility was better than you would expect

and the children turned out more or less okay;

sure there were some shaky years

but no one’s living in the basement anymore

with a divot in his head, that’s where the shrapnel landed/or

don’t look at her stump. It is easy

to feel possessed of a soul that’s better schooled

than the fluffy cloud inside of people who have never known suchlike

events by which our darlings

are unfavorably remade. And the self

is the darling’s darling

(I = darling 2). Every day

I meditate against my envy

aimed at those who drift inside the bubble of no-trouble,

— what is the percentage? 20 % of us? 8 %? zero?

Maybe the ex-president with his nubile daughters,

vigorous old parents, and clean colonoscopy. Grrrr.

Remember to breathe. Breathe in suffering,

breathe out blessings say the ancient dharma texts.

Still I beg to file this one complaint

that some are mountain-biking through the scrublands

while she is here at Ralph’s Thriftway,

running her thumb over a peach’s bruise,

her leg a steel rod

in a miniskirt, to make sure I see.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

JOHN BERGER, The Sense of Sight

In 2006, in Ohio, Joseph Clark raised his head in the middle of his execution to say, “It’s not working.”

The salmon corpses clog the creek without sufficient room to spin:

see, even the fish want to kill themselves this time of year

the therapist jokes. Her remedy

is to record three gratitudes a day—

so let the fish count for one, make two the glaucous gulls

who pluck the eyes before they fill

with the cloudy juice of vanishing.

But don’t these monuments to there -ness

feel a little ostentatious? Not just the gratitudes,

but also what they used to call a hardware store

where you hike for hours underneath the ether

between the ceiling and the dropped-down lighting tubes,

muttering I need a lock-washer for my lawnmower shroud —

huh? You know