Lucia Perillo: On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

Was that all it was? Dumb animal hunger?

All those years when I thought I was making Art

out of The One Important Thing?

And how to apologize now for my lack of adequate concision?

Once I was so full of juice and certain of its unending.

The woman who wears dark glasses large as goggles

has her hand wrapped around the elbow of the young woman

who is beautiful. Where does it come from,

this compulsion not just to know their thinking

but to live inside her for a while, the one

whose eyes are hidden as she looks

down into the impoundment where the salmon who’ve swum upriver

end their travels? It must sound large to her, the clang

a loose piece of metal makes against the cement wall

whenever a fish leaps in its fury, I am claiming

the privilege to impute its fury as we listen to them

thrash. Dozens were killed an hour ago

because their future fate is better if the eggs are stripped

than if they’re left to their fandango

in the frothing of the creek. I have tried to live inside them too,

these fish who strain against the world, or into it, why

am I not so intent on battling my way into the young woman

who moves from one thing to another without hurry?

I would eavesdrop, but they talk in Spanish,

thwarting my attempt to learn if the blind woman can detect

the coolness radiating from the pile of slush, all that remains

of the ice in which the dead were packed

before being trucked off to the food bank: if she could see

she’d see the vapor rising, as from a fire not quite put out.

I feel the need for more humanity

because the winter wren is not enough,

even with its complicated music emanating

from the brambles. So I relent to my friend

who keeps bugging me to see her shaman,

tutored by the Indians who live at the base

of Monte Albán. Tutored also by the heavy bag

at Sonny’s Gym: Box like heaven / Fight like hell

his T-shirt says; the graphic shows an angel’s fist

buried to the wrist in Satan’s brisket, while the prince

of dark jabs the angel’s kisser. Victor

has sandpiper legs, his ponytail a mess of webs,

but he has eaten the ayahuasca vine

and chanted in the sweat lodge

and entered the fight-cage in a bar in Tucson,

Adam’s apple jiggling his Star of David

when he writes me out a prayer.

He says he flew here to visit his grandma,

only she died before the plane touched down—

the dead leave yard sales to the living,

who shoot staple guns at telephone poles

and soothe their eyes with slabs of meat.

No matter how many rounds you go in practice,

he says you always come out unprepared

om ah hum

vajra siddhi padma hum

for the mountain of junk inside the house: cedar canoe

in the rafters and the box of Kotex he found

from her last menstrual period in the 1950s.

I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake—

after crawling through the rotting milfoil on the shore.

At first

the materials offered me were not much—

just some cattails where a hidden bullfrog croaked

and a buckhouse made from corrugated tin—

at first I thought I’d have to write the poem of its vapors.

But wait

long enough and the world caves in,

sends you something like these damselflies

prickling your chest. And the great ventriloquist

insists

you better study them or else:

how the liquidmetal blue gleams like a motorcycle helmet,

how the markings on the thorax wend like a maze,

their abdomens ringed like polecat tails,

the tip of his latched

to the back of her neck

while his scrawny forelegs wipe his mandible

that drops and shuts like a berth on a train.

But when I tallied his legs, he already had six—

those wiper-legs belonged to a gnat

he was cramming in his mouth. Which took a long time

because the gnat struggled, and I tried to imagine

a gnat-size idea of the darkness

once the mandible closed.

Call me bad gnat: see how every other thing strives—

more life!

Even with just two neurons firing the urge.

Then the she-fly’s abdomen swung forward

to take the sperm packet from his thorax,

and he finished chewing

in this position that the field guide calls The Wheel.

Call me the empress of the unused bones,

my thighs fumigated by the rank detritus of the shore

while the meal

and The Wheel

interlocked in a chain

in the blue mouth of the sky

in the blacker mouth beyond

while I sat, as I do, in the shallows of the lake

where sixty thousand damselflies

were being made a half-inch from my heart.

The hungry ghosts are ghosts whose throats

stretch for miles, a pinprick wide,

so they can drink and drink and are never sated.

Every grain of sand is gargantuan

and water goes down thick as bile.

I don’t know how many births it takes to get

reborn as not the flower but the scent.

To be allowed to exist as air (a prayer

to whom?)— dear whom:

the weight of being is too much.

Victor Feguer, for his final meal,

asked for an olive with a pit

so that a tree might sprout from him.

It went down hard, but now the murderer is comfort.

He is a shady spot in the potter’s field.

But it must be painful to be a tree,

to stand so long with your arms up.

You might prefer to be a rock

(if you can wear that heavy cloak).

In Bamiyan, the limestone Buddhas stood

as tall as minor mountains, each one carved

in its own alcove. Their heads

eroded over time, and the swallows

built nests from their dust,

even after zealots blew them up.

Now the swallows wheel in empty alcoves,

their mouths full of ancient rubble.

Each hungry ghost hawks up his pebble

so he can breathe. And the dead

multiply under the olive tree.

There are blows in life, so powerful…

I don’t know!

CESAR VALLEJO, TRANS. CLAYTON ESHLEMAN

Driving past the Masonic graveyard, I see a boy

skateboarding down the new asphalt of the walk

that he veers off so he can jump

and slide along a tombstone.

He has such faith in the necklace of his bones

he will not let a helmet wreck his hair—

why does the brain have to be buried

in the prettiest place? You little shit, don’t you know

someone slaved at the brewery to pay for what was

supposed to stand as shiny as your hair

two centuries or three, when all your ollies

will no longer stir a moth or midge?

But what kind of grump would rather be eaten

by wind and rain than the glissando of a punk

riding off with a whump to the door of the oven

with a few bright flakes of someone else’s death?

Let’s not forget the Naked Woman is still out there, etched

into her aluminum plaque

affixed to her rocket

slicing through the silk of space.

In black and white, in Time, we blast her

off to planets made of gases and canals,

not daring to include, where her legs fork,

the little line to indicate she is an open vessel.

Which might lead to myths about her