Lucia Perillo: On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

you should feel like Walt Whitman, celebrating

everything, but instead you feel like Pope Julius II

commanding Michelangelo to carve forty statues for his tomb.

When even one giant marble Moses feels like a bit too much.

This year made it almost to December without a frost to deflate the dahlias

and though I stared for hours at the psychedelia of their petals,

trying to coax them to apply their shock-paddles to my heart,

it wasn’t working. Until one morning when

I found them black and staggering in their pails,

charred marionettes, twist-tied to their stakes, I apologize

for being less turned-on by the thing than by its going.

Not the sunset

but afterward when we stand dusted with the sunset’s silt,

and not the surgical theater, even with its handsome anesthesiologist

in blue dustcap and booties— no,

his after ’s what I’m buzzed by, the black slide into nothing

(well, someone ought to speak for it).

Or it can come in white— not so much the swirling snow

as the fallen stuff that makes the mind continuous

with the meadow that it sees.

Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others.

PHILIP LARKIN

One day George Washington rides around Mount Vernon

for five hours on his horse, the next

he’s making his auspicious exodus

on the spectrum of possible deaths.

Rasputin was fed cyanide in little cakes

but did not slough his living husk,

and so Prince Felix sang to him, then mesmerized him

with a gaudy cross. And though he dropped when he was shot

he popped back up and ran outside: it was

Purishkevich who fired three times in the courtyard—

but even with his body bound

in the frozen Neva, one arm worked

its way free. Now, he must have howled

while his giblets leaked, though the cold

is reputed to be kind. Sliding his end

toward a numeral less horrible; it falls

say as a six on a scale of zero to ten?

Shakespeare went out drinking, caught a fever,

ding! Odds are we’ll be addled—

what kind of number can be put on that?

One with endless decimals,

unless you luck into some kind woman,

maker of the minimum wage, black or brown and brave enough

to face your final wreck? My friends horde pills

for their bad news, but I wonder if it’s cowardly

to be unequal to the future. Someone should write a book

for nursery school, with crucial facts like: how,

as the sun drops, shadows lengthen, including a sharp

or blurry one that is your own. And you scuttle from it

like a cockroach fleeing light— an anti-roach,

running from the dark. See my feelers, long and feathery:

I am more than well prepared.

Ulysses Grant lay in misery for half a year,

after eating a peach that pained his tongue.

Versus Ivan the Terrible, last heard singing in the bath,

who fainted dead while setting up the chessboard.

The boyish foreign tyrant wears faun-colored desert boots

hooked boyishly around the rungs of his chair

on this talk show where he speaks with the voice of a woman

who interprets from the ether. He’s smiling

like the naughty boy in school who picked his teeth

with a stiletto: mister, you may be despicable

but my boyfriend wore those same boots once,

and I loved him in them, despite the stolen tape deck

in his car. How small a blemish does your narco-trafficking

shrink to, what with that comely stubble on your cheeks,

your brocade cap and wool cape tossed

across your shoulder like a cavalier’s? Perhaps we need

to recalibrate the scale or set your crimes

in one pan of the balance, so when we set your beauty

in the other it will rise, as beauty does, instead of clunking down.

As beauty rises, even when it goes unseen. See

how many of the famous modern paintings

were made by men who have such vigor in old age?

And when I flip open the back covers of their books,

the famous lady poets all have shiny hair.

Isabelle Huppert in a peep show booth

with the wilted bloom of a used Kleenex,

and not her Kleenex, une mouchoir étrange —

this is not a promising get-go.

But can’t my hopes be phototropic

as I sit in the front row with my head cocked back

like a newly fractured dicotyledonous bean

uncurling on its sprout?

The popcorn here is not just bad—

for years the hopper has accrued its crud

so that sometimes you crunch down on what

tastes like a greasy tractor bolt

and are transported to a former Soviet republic

instead of some seedy part of Paris.

You have to swipe the burned nib off your lips

before scuffing it back, toward the lovers who’ve come

to make out in this habitat, upholstered

in the velvet mode of tongues. And when

I turn to see if they’ve noticed

their ankles’ being pinged by my scorched old maids

all the hardware bolted in their faces

glints like moonlight on the road after the crash is cleared away,

as the projector beam keeps on doggedly charging

through a googolplex of twitching motes.

Giving us Isabelle unclothed again,

Isabelle in the tones of the wood of a cello,

Isabelle if you’re trying to save us now

all your skin is not enough.

Monday

Wednesday

Friday,

I swim with the old ladies, hurry:

the synchronized swimming team arrives at three.

We ride the wacky noodles

through blue pastures

lit by chemicals—

I like to go under in my goggles

to watch their them-ness bleed

into my me

until we are evicted by the lifeguard, Danielle.

In the locker room, some retreat into the changing stalls

to sequester their mastectomies,

but your walker will not fit there, no;

you have to peel your swimsuit in the open

with the girls on the team. I’m staring

at one long strip of mostly leg,

daring her to

reciprocate:

but all this future-flesh has made her shy—

the way the belly sometimes flabs from having kids

and doubles down.

I thought this was a them-trait, not a me-trait,

but was mistaken about the boundary—

which turns out not to be a wall, but a net

in which we each hang like a sausage

in a shop window, liquefying in the sun.

Good luck synchro girl, trying to wriggle

into your spangly suit

without taking off your bra—

not wanting any of your you to bleed into your me

as you reach around yourself to pull out what you pull out

by the scruff of its neck:

your limp blue animal

of lace.

* Joe Wenderoth

War Emblem, the famous stallion,

will not mount a female rump

on the island of Hokkaido

in a pasture near the sea.

It is hard to imagine anyone not being overcome

by the sight of two dozen mares

surrounded by volcanoes (is the problem

that the metaphors are too direct?), and yet

War Emblem is still not in the mood.

A thousand years ago the courtesan Shikibu

wrote a thousand poems to her lover,

the references to sex made tasteful through concision

and the image of their kimonos intertwined.

Either her heart was broken or it was full,

either way required some terse phrases to the moon.