Lucia Perillo: Inseminating the Elephant

a posture that made me think of Jesus,

forgive me for saying. But I’m so far gone

I can say anything: Hello Mister Death,

let’s run this bar code through.

Ouch—

that love swing sets you back more than a hundred bucks,

but hey it’s cheaper than the ribbons

and will give you years of sailing back and forth,

hanging from nothing but graveyard fog.

Mounting instructions are included

though they be written in Japanese,

and it even comes in a discreet black shopping bag

to match your — whatever you call it—

your robe your gown.

You were a man and I used to be a woman

before we first put our quarters in

the game at the gas station, whose snack-chip display

wore a film of oil and soot

beside which you turned into a green gargoyle and then

a flying purple lynx—

whereas I could not get the hang of the joystick

and remained as I began

while you kicked my jaw and chopped my spine,

a beating I loved because it meant you were rising

fast through the levels — and the weak glom on

via defeat, which is better than nothing—

insert sound effects here: blip blat ching chin g

…and when they stopped, your claws gripped the naked

— looking pink lizard that I was,

blood-striped and ragged, as if being a trophy

were the one reward the vanquished get—

which is why, walking home through the curbside sludge,

when you held my hand with your arm outstretched

as if you were holding a dripping scalp or head,

I hummed with joy to be your spoils.

Silver moth whose wings flap before landing on the ear—

you stir the air with voices

and then a cloud swirls on the jet stream,

causing a typhoon a world away.

I am not happy about having to become a cell phone person,

even though I see the other cell phone people walking

with their necks bent so the sun can reach that lovely place below their ears.

I feel superior, listening to the juncos’ aggravations

with you squirreled in a pocket on my breast

where you beep your ultimatums. That you have a molten look

makes me think that you could seep

into my body, so I’d contain multitudes

like Walt Whitman, all my friends alphabetized

along with the pain clinic, all ruled by that prim mistress

who asks for the codes and is so firm in her denials,

firm in her goodbye. I’d renounce her altogether

did my bones not have their exigencies—

when I fall, you give a little yawn as you unfold,

and then a fireman comes to lift me, muscles rumpling his rubber coat,

and I think that he will never age.

Why can’t the mind simply roll around on its own wheels?

Why can’t the body be rewired like a lamp?

The other cell phone people draw a thread through the world and stitch it close

whereas I go around huffing in a state of irritation

that I take to be the honest state of nature,

which is why I listen to the juncos, though it’s difficult to decode their words.

And though I hold you, Moth, in my contempt, I’ve spoken through you

for enough minutes from what the corporation calls my plan

that your numbers have become infused with my mouth’s smell.

It is not the junco’s bird-smell of vinegar and berries

but that person-smell of roasted meat and sweat,

and I could spray you with disinfectant but that would fry your circuitry—

to wipe away the human would make you go kaput.

All day long the sun is busy, going up and going down,

and the moon is busy, swinging the lasso of its gravity.

And the clouds are busy, metamorphing as they skid—

the vultures are busy, circling in their kettle.

And the river is busy filling up my britches

as I sit meditating in the shallows until my legs go numb.

Upstream I saw salmon arching half into the air:

glossy slabs of muscle I first thought were seals.

They roiled in a deeper pocket of the river,

snagged in a drift net on Indian land.

Trying to leap free before relenting to the net

with a whack of final protest from the battered tail.

They’ll be clubbed, I know, when the net’s hauled up

but if there were no net they’d die anyway when they breed.

You wonder how it feels to them: their ardent drive upstream.

What message is delivered when the eggs release.

A heron sums a theory with one crude croak; the swallows

write page after page of cursive in the air. My own offering

is woozy because when their bodies breached the surface

the sun lit them with a flash that left me blind.

Animal attack is Number One in the list called

“Ways in Which I Do Not Want to Die”—

wait, Ben says knock it off with the death-talk;

you’ve already talked death to death.

But the Number Ones don’t need our speech

to claim their cool dark storage place: my sister said

hers was falling down the stairs, after her husband left

and every riser turned into El Capitan.

Sleeping on the sofa did nothing about the steps

connecting the world to her front porch. Three is more

than enough, given a new moon and tallow on the instep

and the right force-vectors applied to the neck.

I said Relax, you should join a health club

so my sister rowed until she withered to a twig,

and when the office microfiche clerk did fall down the stairs

all that hemoglobin on the cellar floor

sent my sister’s paw back to her popcorn bowl

as she asked the darkness from a fetal pose

about the safety of a pup tent

set up in a housing tract.

Thus do our Number Ones sit on our chests

like sumo wrestlers in lifeboats — rowing rowing.

And some nights in my phantasmagloriland

I am supped by shark or dingo dog or a cannibal king.

Then I am a movie star (if not your classic movie star),

just one of the shriekers who is always beautiful

when her head spins suddenly

and her hair fans.

And what could Numbers Seven or Twelve offer by compare:

those falling-elevator dreams

the fire dreams

the riptide dreams

the dreams of death as a mere phenomenon of weather?

I know my celebrity is fleeting as I thrash and holler and yet

see the moviegoers prick up in their seats:

see the good it does,

how it is not so grim or tragic

when the boy-hand spiders across girl-shouldermeat

and she curls against him

like a pink prawn thawing from the freezer.

Then his hand goes tumbling to her breast—

you see what magic I am giving them

astir in frumpy velvet seats arrayed in front of my disquiet

at this brink this moment when she lets it stay.

Don’t look up, because the ceiling is suffering

some serious violations of the electrical code,

the whole chaotic kelplike mess

about to shower us with flames.

I think I can render this clearly enough—

Bert’s saxophone hanging between his knees,

propped against the wheelchair’s seat

where his body keeps shape-shifting—

he’s Buddha then shop-vac then Buddha again,

formlessness floating on top of form.

The problem is backstory, how to get it all in,