Lucia Perillo: On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

being lined with teeth,

knives, snakes, bees— an armament

flying through the firmament. Beside the man

who stands correctly nonerect, his palm

upraised to show he comes in peace,

though you globulous yet advanced beings

have surely taken a gander of our sizzling planet

and can see us even through our garments.

So you know about the little line—

how a soft animal cleaves from her

and how we swaddle it in fluff,

yet within twenty years we send it forth

with a shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled-grenade launcher:

you have probably worked out a theory

to explain the transformation. And you

have noticed how she looks a bit uncertain

as she stands on her right leg, her left thrust out

as if she’s put her foot on top of something

to keep it hidden. Could be an equation

on a Post-it, or could be a booby trap—

now comes time to admit we do not know her very well, she

who has slipped the noose of our command. Be careful

when you meet her, riding on her shaft of solar wind:

you will have to break her like a wishbone

to get her open, she whom we filled with teeth

and knives and snakes and bees.

The TV knob was made of resin, its gold skirt

like a Kewpie doll’s, but it was gone.

So we changed the channel

with a pair of pliers (on the flat spot

on the spindle): chunk chunk

and then lo, Jerry Lewis. Chunk chunk and lo,

the marionettes with giant hands. The song went:

my heart would be a fireball. And in the chunking

and the singing and the watching, lo, my heart became one.

Less pageantry in the now. Say Sputnik : no other word

climbs my throat with such majestic flames.

Gone, the marionettes in flightsuits made of foil

gone grainy on the boob tube. The tremulous way

their bodies moved, my fear for their well-being.

The comic stupidity of the child,

which is forgiven. Unlike the stupidities to come.

The boy had a guinea pig named Fireball, so I taught him

the song by way of mourning

when it died. He still possessed his sweetness,

unlike older sons who think you are a moron without big

subwoofers in your car. To that son I say:

you may think you’re one of the alpha-carnivores

just because you’ve shot many avatars of whores

on a video screen that you will never have the Cuban missile crisis on;

you do not even really have the bomb, and how can anyone

command their cool without the bomb: Sam Cooke, James Dean,

those boys lived kitty-corner to their annihilation.

But my son glazes— what’s so special about the past

when everyone has one? And yours, he says,

is out of gas. Then vroom, he’s off—

you might think his car is breathing by the way the windows

bend. Welcome to the new world, Mom,

he says, if you hear singing, it ain’t a song.

After the physics final, Gina and I, in our mukluks

scuffed past the swanky shops on Sherbrooke

then climbed the mountain in the city. December 5,

1975: I tried to will myself to have a vision, though the stars

would not cooperate— instead of a sweat lodge

or a kiva, the warm-up hut at the top of Mount Royal

looked completely un-aboriginal, a replica in miniature

of the Château de Versailles. With night all around us

cold and thick as glass, I don’t know how the starlight

managed to pass through it to sting me, it was hard enough

to lift my hand to knock the door, a joke,

it was so late. And here past the midpoint of my life

I think I’ll die without a paranormal apparition

to which I could wholeheartedly attest. I am not sure

I even have a soul, a corny soul, a little puppet

made of cream and feathers. Yet the door

did open (turned out to be only six p.m.)

and the old man said, Ah jeunes filles, il paraît que vous

avez froid. Then he unstacked two chairs and set them

down before the fire, still chewing its meal of logs

in the giant hearth. Inside the château of our silence,

we sat and chewed our lips: wasn’t the sacred knowledge

supposed to involve telepathy with animals, and astral travel

to planets made of light? Kindness (b) seemed too corny

to be the answer ( Restez ici pour le temps que vous

voudrez ) though we were given no other choice

except (a) his sweeping, and (c) the mice inside the walls.

When he was flush, we ate dinner

at Tung Sing on Central Avenue

where my father liked the red-dye-number-toxic

bright and shiny food: spareribs, sweet-

and-sour pork— what else

was there to care about, except his sleep

under the pup tent of the news? And the car,

which was a Cadillac until he saw how they

had become the fortresses of pimps—

our hair may look stylish now,

but in the photograph it always turns against us:

give it time and it will turn. Maybe it was in 1976

he went to see the enemy, the man

(with sideburns) who sold German cars

and said: take it easy, step at a time,

see how the diesel motor sounds

completely different. So off he went tink-tink-tink

around the block in the old neighborhood

where he imagined people (mostly black: by now

his mouth had mastered the word’s exhale,

then cut) lifting their heads to look (- kuh ).

And he, a short man, sat up taller as he swung

back into the lot to make the deal, although

to mitigate the shift in his allegiances

(or was this forgiveness? — for the Germans

had bombed his boat as he sailed through Gibraltar)

he kept the color constant. Champagne,

the color of a metal in a dream, no metal

you could name, although they tried

with a rich man’s drink. He could afford it now

though it made him feel a little silly, his hand a lump

of meat around the glass’s narrow, girlish stem.

Great-Uncle Stefan wears the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s sailor suit,

its cap flat and black, his long

dark hair pomaded in a stiff

blunt skirt behind his neck.

There’s something about the nose’s

bulb-and-nostril conglomeration that we share,

and though I’m not a man I like to think

I am a sailor, with a waxed moustache like his

whose curled-up ends provide

an occupation for our nervous hands,

twirling it so as not to betray

with a squint or smirk his sympathies,

which lie with the murderer Princip.

Who shot the Archduke in Sarajevo, where

it took me a long time in the assassination museum,

reading Cyrillic via the osmotic method

of translation, before I figured out

Princip was the hero of the place: a person

could match her feet with his imprinted

in the sidewalk and pull the trigger of her fingers.

And enter the fantasy of being The One Who Caused

The Greater Past, which I could not resist:

my knuckle crooked, and clicked.

However I did spare the Duchess Sophie.

It’s the Bronx, Barretto Point, so the sea

cannot be far away. But all we have to go on

is the lone pine in the distance— the rest

bleached by the chemistry of time. Also

there’s this young man in the foreground, squatting

with his forearms balanced on the fulcrum of his knees,