Lucia Perillo - Inseminating the Elephant

not just Bert’s beanie and tie-dye T-shirt,

but polio too, and the tune itself, concentric ripples

widening. So now I send dead Jim Pepper

rippling out, as well as his grandfather,

fancy-dancing and chanting. How to tender

the lead-in, would phonemes do any good

(the signature DAHH , the doon doon s down-marching)—

or just call it a prayer to simplify things

as Bert sends the melody way out

beyond the tidiness of circles?

Then he puts the mouthpiece aside

to bring up the words from the floor of his soul

or say from the pads of his spud-shaped feet

spraddling the footplate, if soul is too hokey

for all the misty goo inside us.

First comes the Creek part of the song

and then comes the English, when Bert throws back his chin:

his underbeard raised in a coyote salute

to the water infusing the warehouse roof.

Here, take a seat on these rickety risers

inside my head, though your life isn’t mine,

still, I have hope for your hearing

the gist of this refrain

about how glad he is that he’s not dead.

From Hartford, from Allentown, they used to send their letters—

the corporate stationery featured the word LIFE .

Somewhere radio towers twinked

and garters held up the socks of men

whose fine print said that if I ever lost my arm in a buzz-saw accident—

boy, that would be the day my ship came in.

So I pictured myself shopping for produce with my feet,

a melon riding on my tarsal bones and money

smoking in my pocket. But this dream-trafficking gave way

to wondering what it took to land in jail—

for steady meals and solitude

and a tin cup to play the bars like a marimba!

You might need enough time to write a book as long as Proust’s,

yet not so much to fire up the chair they call Ol’ Sparky:

so we’re talking a fine calibration here. To elsewhere

my love and I will be speeding in the car

when he’ll clap his ears: Stop I can’t stand any more this Looosha talk!

leaving the steering wheel dangerously unattended

though I tell him many writers think about the hoosegow

as a meditative place. Especially now

when the junk mail comes in photon blips,

say from Mrs. Mobutu Sese Seko needing a little cash to tide her over

and spokespersons for the penis you have to wind on a wheel

like a garden hose. What insurance executive

walks to work anymore while dreaming

up fine print for my lost feet?

There is much to envy in that woman

who flaunts her perfect body on the Key West shore—

yet five thousand dollars still seems like a lot of money,

especially for one of these fingers I don’t use much.

The zoologists who came from Germany

wore bicycle helmets and protective rubber suits.

So as not to be soiled by substances

that alchemize to produce laughter in the human species;

how does that work biochemically is a question

whose answer I have not found yet. But these are men

whose language requires difficult conjugations under any circumstance:

first, there’s the matter of the enema, which ought to come

as no surprise. Because what the news brings us

is often wheelbarrows of dung — suffering,

with photographs. And so long as there is suffering,

there should be also baby elephants — especially this messy,

headlamp-lit calling-forth. The problem lies

in deciding which side to side with: it is natural

to choose the giant rectal thermometer

over the twisted human form,

but is there something cowardly in that comic swerve?

Hurry an elephant

to carry the bundle of my pains,

another with shiny clamps and calipers

and the anodyne of laughter. So there, now I’ve alluded

to my body that grows ever more inert — better not overdo

lest you get scared; the sorrowing world

is way too big. How the zoologists start

is by facing the mirror of her flanks,

that foreboding luscious place where the gray hide

gives way to a zeroing-in of skin as vulnerable as an orchid.

Which is the place to enter, provided you are brave,

brave enough to insert your laser-guided camera

to avoid the two false openings of her “vestibule,”

much like the way of entering death, of giving birth to death,

calling it forth as described in the Tibetan Book.

And are you brave enough to side with laughter

if I face my purplish, raw reflection

and attempt the difficult entry of that chamber where

the seed-pearl of my farce and equally opalescent sorrow

lie waiting?

I don’t know where you rank in my list of killers:

my viral load, my sociopaths, my inattention

on the interstate, where I crane my head after the hawk

and the windshield splatters

into diamonds. Not just thinking about the hawk,

or even merely watching it, I always have to be it for a minute,

just as my mind enters the murderers

for one long flash before it stumbles out.

From your postmortem, you held us fast

while a man said It’s enough as his lungs filled

after being stabbed here near the playground,

before they milled his limbs with power tools

and scattered him beyond retrieval. Too late

to recall your brain, and the fatty white part of your spine,

already delivered to the rendering plant

and melted down into the slurry.

That night is gone and cannot be reassembled

despite my re-imagining the car

with a man dying in its trunk, a car otherwise like any other,

as we could not verify your affliction

for days after you fell. Which left the land in chaos

except for Scatter Creek’s flowing past,

wending without hurry though the coastal range

before it empties rain and blood into Willapa Bay.

Should we not know that James Garfield suffered from crippling writer’s block and simply could not finish his speech until 2:30 on the morning of the inaugural? As the day approached, he had an anxiety dream in which he fell off a canal boat and was suddenly standing naked in the wilderness during a wild storm. After finding a few pieces of cloth to cover himself and embarking on “a long and tangled journey,” he found his way to a house where “an old negro woman took me into her arms and nursed me as though I were a sick child.” Comforted, he awoke to face his presidency .

TED WIDMER, The American Scholar , WINTER 2005

Start with one cell, call it a zygote,

call it a diploid that turns into me — fool, petunia, witch.

Samaritan and crow. Endless nouns

I could plug in. And yet my eye

can be told from the world’s other billions of eyeballs

by machines that map the galaxy

of specks and glints that make up its blue ring.

Then how to account for Garfield’s dream

being the same one I’ve dreamed,

except the old woman had a child and the child held a doll

who was a replica of the child?

I think there’s a me in a black veil

who has dreamed it, too

(because the crow is a fool because the witch will presume),

as well as a me who’ll strap explosives to his chest

tomorrow, when he’ll blow himself back

into the disarray of cells.

Dear Assassin:

stay here with me in the dream—