Lucia Perillo: On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

they sip the pond through narrow beaks.

Orange and yellow, this recurrence

that comes with each year’s baby leaves.

And if the tree is a church and spring is Sunday,

then the birds are fancy hats of women breaking into song.

Or say the tree is an old car whose tank is full,

then the birds are the girls on a joyride

crammed in its seats. Or if the tree is the carnival

lighting the tarmac of the abandoned mall by the freeway,

then the birds are the men with pocketknives

who erect its Ferris wheel.

Or say the tree is the boat that chugs into port

to fill its hold and deck with logs,

then the birds are the Russian sailors who

rise in the morning in the streets where they’ve slept,

rubbing their heads and muttering

these words that no one understands.

Every morning I put on my father’s shirt

whose sleeves have come unraveled—

the tag inside the collar though

is strangely unabraded, it says

Traditionalist

one hundred per cent cotton

made in Mauritius

Which suddenly I see is a haiku

containing the requisite syllables and even

a seasonal image

if you consider balmy Mauritius

with its pineapples and sugarcane.

And this precision sends me off

down the dirt road of my fantasy

wherein my father searched

throughout the store to find this shirt

to send an arrow from before the grave

to exit on the other side of it,

the way Bashō wrote his death poem:

On a journey, ill

my dream goes wandering

over withered fields

It suits my father to have hunted down

a ready-made for his own poem,

not having much of an Eastern sensibility,

having been stationed in China during the war and hating it

despite the natural beauty of Kunming.

They say a man dies when the last person

with a memory of him dies off, or maybe

he dies when his last shirt falls to ruin. Now

its cuffs show the dirty facing all the way around

and a three-inch strip of checkered flannel dangles down

into my breakfast cereal:

I have debated many days but

here it goes—

snip

and am overcome by an Asian wash of sadness.

Because the washer spins so violently, like time—

perhaps its agitations can be better withstood

with the last-memory theory, which means that a dead man

reposes longest in the toddlers that he knew,

which often are not many,

children being afraid of old men,

what with their sputum-clearing rasps

and their propensity for latching on to cheeks,

though my father was not much of a child-cheek-pincher,

not that he had anything against them;

he had a grandson he tolerated

crawling under the table at La Manda’s

where between forkfuls of scungilli

as his kidneys chugged with insufficient vim,

he composed his other death poem,

the one that came in his own words, it went

Soon I must cross

the icy sidewalk—

help. There goes my shoe

Trees bare. Days short. And at dusk

crows pour through the sky in strands.

From a point in the east too small

to feed your eye on, they pop

into being as sharp dark stars, and then

are large, and then are here, pouring west.

Something chilling about it,

though they are birds like any birds.

What’s fishy is the orchestration, all of them

with a portion of the one same mind: they fly

as if the path were laid, as if

there were runnels in the air, molding

their way to the roost. Whose location

no one seems to know— if they did,

you’d think there would be chitchat

in the market about the volume

of their screams, as if women were being

dragged by the hair through the woods

at night. But everybody keeps mum—

it seems we’re in cahoots with them

without knowing what’s the leverage

they possess (though we can feel it)

to extract from us this pact, this vow.

Now my body has become so stylish in the ancient way — didn’t Oedipus

also have a bloated foot? Yes,

I remember him tied by the ankle in a tree, after his father heard the terrible

prophecy and left him hanging

for the animals to peck and lap, same way the dog likes to lap my bloated foot

when I take off the special socks

meant to squeeze it down. He likes to eat my epidermal cells before they fly

off on the air that moves on through

the tallest trees one valley south, where great blue herons build their nests

and ride on small twigs up — then gently

do their legs glide down my binoculars’ field of view. The twigs they ride on

never crack; how do they calculate

the tensile strength of cellulose versus their hollow bones? I thought of this

at the hospital cafeteria

as I stared down an oldish woman’s half-cubit of shanklebone, exposed

between her sock and slack: it was

oldish skin I lapped until scowled at by her companion, who reached to the hem

of her pant-leg and for the sake of what

rule of decorum gently pulled it down?

The dogs of the childless are barely dogs.

From tufted pillows, they rule the kingdom.

They’d stand for their portraits

in velvet suits, if they had suits—

holding hats with giant feathers.

And ousting the question: who loves the dog more?

the question becomes: who does the dog love?

The woman says: you are the one who plays him

a drum, you tap the anthem on his head.

No, the man says, you debone him the hen,

you tie the bow of his cravat.

The dogs of the childless sleep crosswise in bed,

from human hip to human hip — a canine wire

completes the circuit. The man says: I wonder

what runs through his head

when he squeaks and snorls all through his dream?

And the woman says: out

of the dream, I’m in his dream,

riding the hunt in my lovely saddle.

When the masters are gone, the dogs of the childless

stand in the mirror with swords on their hips.

They’d stand for their portraits with dogs of their own

if we were kings, if they weren’t dogs.

Light passing through the leaves obliterates the subtitles

when the thief overtakes the swordsman

and forces his bride to submit. This is why

I need a new 42-inch flat-screen TV—

so I can read the dialogue of foreign films

that will improve me, though frankly it is horrible

to see the swordsman tied up and to watch him watch

the change in his wife’s fingers

on the thief’s (somewhat doughy) back. First

it looks as if she’s fighting him, but then

she seems to pull him close,

saying Now I am stained and must be killed or

How do whales strain such tiny krill —these problems

of interpretation can be solved by money:

we need larger words. I have not abandoned words

even if with trepidation I now enter

the kind of store where they sell plastic polygons

that hum and blink. As the swordsman’s wife

enters the forest on her pony, her trepidation draped

with a veil that renders even the biggest tv powerless

to show much of her face. But she shows the thief her foot

in its fancy flip-flop: that’s what rouses him