Lucia Perillo: On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

Achilles slays the man who slew his friend, pierces the corpse

behind the heels and drags it

behind his chariot like the cans that trail

a bride and groom. Then he lays out

a banquet for his men, oxen and goats

and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat

until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.

The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—

in the morning more animals must be killed

for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds

no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;

not even heaving four stallions on the pyre

can lift the ballast of his sorrow.

And here I turn my back on the epic hero— the one who slits

the throats of his friend’s dogs,

killing what the loved one loved

to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent

by vanishing from my concern

after he throws the dogs onto the fire.

The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.

When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep

until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially

which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets

and tails like peacocks, covered in tar

weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows

at the rim of the marsh. But once

I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals

my first lament. So now I guard

my inhumanity like the jackal

who appears behind the army base at dusk,

come there for scraps with his head lowered

in a posture that looks like appeasement

though it is not.

I have become what I have always been and it has taken a lifetime, all of my own life, to reach this point where it is as if I know finally that I am alive and that I am here, right now.

TOBIAS SCHNEEBAUM, Keep the River on Your Right

When you spend many hours alone in a room

you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself—

this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal

but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us

do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,

from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bit

a thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum,

who walked four days into the jungle

and stayed for the kindness of the tribe—

who would have thought that cannibals would be so tender?

This could be any life: the vegetation is thick

and when there is an opening, you follow

down its tunnel until one night you find yourself

walking as on any night, though of a sudden your beloved

friends are using their stone blades

to split the skulls of other men. Gore everywhere,

though the chunk I ate was bland;

it was only when I chewed too far and bled

that the taste turned satisfyingly salty.

How difficult to be in a body,

how easy to be repelled by it,

eating one-sixth of the human heart.

Afterward, the hunters rested

their heads on one another’s thighs

while the moon shined on the river

for the time it took to cross the narrow sky

making its gash through the trees…

while the books lay open, scattered facedown

like turtles sunning, the jackets hunched, with a little

hump in the hunch from the trough of the spine,

bearing a white sticker with the typewriter’s Courier

font rendition of the decimal system

under the wrapper, hazy like fog

taped to the book, the tape’s yellow orange-almost

(depending on how old) reinforced with threads.

Meanwhile his eyes drifted back and forth

back and forth until the book slid to the floor.

The flag then. Then snow. Or the corporate logo

of the eye— all night the night would watch him,

plural, them. Just ask my friend whose father

was a drunk, a highball glass on the nightstand and a swizzle

stick to mark his place. Still, on Thursday nights

he stumbled down to the reading room

to leaf through the new arrivals.

Oh green republic where the pilgrims came to land!

If I’m going to choose my nostalgia it is a no-brainer

that I’m going to side with books, with the days

before the lithium-ion battery, but after

Philip Roth and John le Carré were born, books not too

highbrow or too low, but sometimes thick

and overdue. Books the fathers read to escape us

who were the shackles that the plodding days

latched on to them who’d started out their lives with war, so this

was perfect, courting danger in their underwear,

feeling the breast of the vixen stiffen,

slipping their hands into the thief’s black glove.

Though the twins were not identical, they both had skin

so thin & clear I could see their veins’ squiggling underneath.

One with red hair, one with white

& the veins made their combined colors patriotic

if a little terrifying

in the auditorium where we’d assembled,

their tears falling in a formal style of grief

reserved for civic purposes, I learned this

from mothers who’d stood by the mailbox, weeping

as we filed by them in the school bus

six years before, when bullets ruined the famous head

of the famous handsome man. Now

the girls’ red eye-rims similarly deliquesced,

their shrill notes ascending:

President Eisenhower! Has! Died!

news that made me scratch an old mosquito bite

& scrutinize the upturned faces of my shoes—

even in my girlish nerdfog

I must have understood that some will not withstand posterity,

that all the bodies on the beach at Normandy

still lead to the muse’s turning her cool marble shoulder.

Permissible to insert here the twins’ white lashes

& the curve of their hot foreheads. But

how tentatively one must ask the nouns & verbs

to step apart for Eisenhower, though he ransacked

more than his share of cities. Like the moon

his pale head hovers, yet he does not go around

like some transhistorical Fuller Brush man

sticking his foot in the door

the pale girl of my ode slams shut.

Half costume jewel, half parasite, you stood

swaying to the music of cash registers in the distance

while a helicopter chewed the linings

of the clouds above the clear-cuts.

And I forgave the pollen count

while cabbage moths teased up my hair

before your flowers fell apart when they

turned into seeds. How resigned you were

to your oblivion, unlistening to the cumuli

as they swept past. And soon those gusts

will mill you, when the backhoe comes

to dredge your roots, but that is not

what most impends, as the chopper descends

to the hospital roof so that somebody’s heart

can be massaged back into its old habits.

Mine went a little haywire

at the crest of the road, on whose other side

you lay in blossom.

As if your purpose were to defibrillate me

with a thousand electrodes,

one volt each.