Lucia Perillo: Inseminating the Elephant

sticking up as I sat in the car,

the kid in the dress. Newark burned

just over the river, not so far south

as the South of their skin — deepening

under the ointment of sweat, skin and sweat

they’d hauled from the South

brother by brother and cousin by cousin

to build brick walls for men like my father

while Newark burned, and Plainfield burned,

while the men kept their rhythm, another brick set,

then the flat side of the trowel moving

across the top as my father crossed the mud.

I sat in the car with the silver bulb of the door lock

sticking up, though I was afraid,

the kid in the dress, the trowel moving

across the top of the course of bricks.

You can’t burn a brick,

you smashed a brick through a window,

the downward stroke, another brick set,

but to get the window first you needed a wall,

and they were building the wall,

they were building the wall

while my father, in his brown loafers,

stepped toward them with their pay.

Mario Perillo has died, call him Mr. Italy—

and I regret never having gone sightseeing

in a bus marked PERILLO TOURS.

He was no relative of mine,

all that connects us is the name:

this foldout plastic promotional rain hat

someone handed me at birth.

An accident of the alphabet: can’t say

I haven’t craved a more streamlined form — sometimes

you get tired of being Lucia Perillo

and want to slide by, without ripping the ether

with all your cognominal barbs and hooks.

Anthony DiRenzo, my old cubicle-mate,

went by the name of Mr. Renz—

a truncation that once caused my scorn to sputter forth,

though now I see: the burden of the vowels.

First there’s the issue of the sonic clang

and next there’s the issue of our guilt,

that we’ve strayed onto turf where we don’t belong,

so far from the outer-borough homelands

of shoe repair and autobody shops.

This is the guilt Verdi captures in his aria

“Di Provenza il mar,” which Anthony sang

one night in our empty basement office

while snow spread its hush money two floors above.

Alfredo’s father is begging him to come home,

to abandon the floozy he picked up in Paris—

if he waits a hundred years, he can hop

aboard Mario’s red-and-green tour bus

in time for the cocktail hour, perhaps,

with honeydew melon served the way I love it:

wrapped in the paper-thin slices of fat

that choked my father’s heart.

Sometimes a name seems our most arbitrary possession,

and sometimes it seems like the grain in a rock

like a sculptor’s hunk of Italian marble: whack it

and you might get either your first glimpse of a saint

or a pile of rubble. Now Mario P.

has entered my obituary book

facing Lucia Pamela, another tour guide of sorts,

having recorded her album on the moon

after flying there in her pink Cadillac.

One nutty broad , Mario would say: A real fruity-patootie —

whose off-key canzone-ing would plink in my ears

way too unsweetly this time of the morning

as Verdi holds forth through the hi-fispeakers

with another ( true story ) Lucia-of-the-vowels

singing the role of Alfredo’s beloved slut.

In my own flights of grandeur, I am a wormhole

connecting the Roman Empire to outer space,

joining the Old World to the dogs on the moon—

however crudely my name has roughed me in.

In my hometown, Perillos were common as shrubs,

a tribe in white lipstick and lamb-chop sideburns,

such as worn by the one who spirited me to the docks

in the spaceship of his Nova. He even wore

my dad’s middle name, and I bet the vortex of his lips

meeting mine would have ripped the cosmic silk

or caused a galactic cymbal crash. Or blown

the head gasket of the space-time bus:

sing Tuscany Mercury Verdi Prosciutto —

hail Mary, just Mary, three times for my penance

and thank the aniseed liquor for blacking me out.

The square watermelons that sell for ninety-two dollars in Japan

show up next to a painting by Congo the chimpanzee,

which sold for twenty-six thousand dollars yesterday,

though by yesterday I don’t mean “yesterday”

because Congo died of tuberculosis forty years ago

and this newspaper is two months old,

and who knows where you ( hypothetical reader ) lie

if-anywhere in the future? You’ll have to add X

to all the numbers as time passes

because the prices usually inflate

while space collapses around these things that hum as if with current,

until they’re placed so close sparks arc across

and make my dental fillings zing.

And though matter is supposed to fly outward for X more billion years

(minus the time-space between me ≠ you)

flick the remote or

turn the page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer —

and this melon turns into a mouse grafted to a human ear,

suggesting we’ve hastened the constriction

of the final falling-in. Yet

might not all this juxtapositional cram-it-all-in-ness

be our sly protest against the flying-out?

As in the new craze called sacred snuggling

where bodies touch, but do not rub

any membrane that might lubricate?

Wishful thinking? This belief

that we’ll move toward the smell of sweat and scalp

when the giant meteor comes at last

or the bomb slants across the laundry lines (≠)—

whatever the accelerant of our demise?

Me,

I’d rather be immersed, that’s how far my matter’s scattered,

that I’d leave all you behind

to skinny-dip in darkness at the end,

touched by nothing but a spring-fed lake.

After paddling out, I found the manatees

in canals behind the pricey homes,

as I once found the endangered Hawaiian goose

beside the hulks that once were dream cars.

So the scarce beast gets its camouflage

at the farthest outpost of our expectations:

the gators prefer golf courses to marshes,

prefer Cheetos, Fritos, nachos, Ho Hos

to baby fish as bright as coins.

What doesn’t kill us makes us strong

(see the scar where propellers have cut through the hide),

but doesn’t that mean some of us will be killed

and not made strong? My sweet flabbies

swing their gum-rubber hips in freshwater

murmuring from the air-conditioning compressors

and waggle my little boat with their bristles—

what doesn’t tip us over

makes us give a whopper sigh.

Look up, and a geezer by his pool

feeds a great blue heron from his hand:

they are so alike they could be twins, him croaking

a tune the bird has come to know

and stalks at certain times of day.

Meanwhile two girls next door in bathing suits

who have turned on the hose in their backyard

hop now at the edge of their wooden bulkhead

singing Come to us humanities

and oh see how they do.

The professor stabbed his chest with his hands curled like forks

before coughing up the question

that had dogged him since he first read Emerson:

Why am I “I”? Like musk oxen we hunkered

while his lecture drifted against us like snow.

If we could, we would have turned our backs into the wind.