Lucia Perillo - Inseminating the Elephant

it seemed we’d grown too peculiar

and I thought: Oh-ho kisses, are you leaving too

like the man’s hair? Or like

the taut bellies we once had

or the menstrual period that was mine alone—

time flew its coop

our days did skid

and now see my commas going too—

art mimicking life’s mortal nature?

So I did no hem-haw with the man

I told him to grab hold of my ears

since daylight burned

the tide had begun to apply its suction then

the shotguns of our lips turned toward

what was perhaps the last of our wild flock.

They found the missing bride and she is living.

They found the boys floating on the ocean in their little yellow raft.

The ornithologists found the extinct woodpecker

when it flew over their canoe.

Not everyone is convinced, though.

One recording of its distinctive knock turned out to be a gunshot.

A century of Ozark fishermen

said they saw the bird when they were stranded

on their hummocks in the swamp.

Nobody believed them but the catfish in their pails.

Those boys thought their muscles strong enough to paddle against the squall.

And the bride only wanted a bus trip west

before the rest of her life downed her like an olive.

Sometimes survival strikes us dumb

with the improbable story of resurrection;

we see the blossoms smutted on the ground

turning back into a flowering tree. Next year

there’ll be new nettle stalks

to sting your fingers, which you’ll drag

through the serrated leaves to prove

the world has not lost the consolation of its old pain.

For a long time you lay tipped on your side like a bicycle

but now your pedaling has stopped. Already

the mosquitoes have chugged their blisterful of blood

and flown on. Time moves forward,

no cause to weep, I keep reminding myself of this:

the body will accrue its symptoms. And the manuals of style

that warn us not to use the absolutes, are wrong:

the body will always accrue its symptoms.

But shouldn’t there also be some hatchlings within view:

sufficient birth to countervail the death?

At least a zero on the bottom line:

I’m not asking for black integers,

just for nature not to drive our balance into the dirt.

What should we utter over the broken glass that marks your grave?

The bird books give us mating calls but not too many death songs.

And whereas the Jews have their Kaddish and the Tibetans

have their strident prayers, all I’m impelled to do is sweet-talk

the barricades of heaven. Where you my vector

soar already, a sore thumb among the clouds.

Still I can see in the denuded maple one of last year’s nests

waiting to be filled again, a ragged mass of sticks.

Soon the splintered shells will fill it

as your new geeks claim the sky — any burgling

of bloodstreams starts when something yolky breaks.

And I write this as if language could give restitution for the breakage

or make you lift your head from its quilt of wayside trash.

Or retract the mosquito’s proboscis, but that’s language again,

whose five-dollar words not even can unmake you.

after reading Anne Carson’s Sappho translation

How sad it must be in Greece when winter comes,

like Coney Island but with a less-brutal sea,

and what is sadder than a hot dog or souvlaki for that matter

when the last nub of meat slips through the bun

and the girls cover up their gowns so like translucent grocery sacks

caught spookily in trees and I think they’re olive trees

only because I don’t know much about Greece,

how do you expect me to know anything

when the papyri are in such tatters?

In all we have of Sappho’s poems, the silences

come rolling forth like bowling balls:

blank after blank after blank after blank

[to remind us of what’s missing].

Then comes a word like Gongyla or Gorgo,

which sounds like the name of a Japanese movie monster

instead of a girl too lovely

to be eating a hot dog made of useless lips.

But there is no food in Sappho’s poems,

which makes me wonder about every other missing else,

who cooked the meat and carted off the chamber pots

so Sappho could stroll under the olive boughs so unencumbered

by her body, her reputedly squat wrestler’s body,

thereby left free to strum her lyre? I am not saying

it is an easy thing to write a poem that will be remembered

for three thousand years, but it is a harder thing

to build a temple out of rocks. A temple

where the girls will party all-nite

until their gowns start flying off

and into that ferocious silence:

[ ].

Then comes two words intact—

I want

The new guy bought it as a present for his wife

(this a story Jim is telling)—

like a love swing like I think of as a love swing?

Jim uh-huhs: she’ll ride it Christmas morn.

So let us stop to praise the new guy’s paunch,

the dimpling in his wife’s thighs,

though when I ask if I could ride a love swing

Jim says, “I’m afraid your love swing days are through.”

In case of fire, strike chest with hammer

and wind up all the dogs in the neighborhood,

while I zen out trying to remember the name of… ah…

not Leland Stanford but Stanford White:

architect of Madison Square Garden,

where the famous velvet swing hung in his tower studio—

tapestries, sketches, photographs, a hive

of mammoth work and mammoth pleasure

all mashed together in one place.

But it was the swing

that drove jurors wild at the trial

where the killer named Thaw got off the hook

because his young bride Evelyn had ridden it,

laughing and kicking her dainty feet. And I think:

Maybe everybody in America has a love swing,

maybe it’s as common as a jungle gym,

a secret no one has let me in on

until now, when it’s too late. And my next thought

is that I have been all my life a tad repressed,

I mean I prided myself on having been around the block

but I never rode a love swing. Okay:

I’ve bought a costume or two at the department store

that also sells chopped meat and pineapples

where you hide the impractical straps and struts

between gardening gloves and a ream of typing paper

as they roll along the checkout’s conveyor belt

where the bra gets dinged with grease.

But nothing requiring tools, nothing with such

ramifications: the kids pouncing on their bunk beds

while you’re hammering away, I mean hanging it up

so you can kick a paper parasol like the one that Stanford White

hung from the ceiling: fiddle dee dee.

What about the giant hooks?

and Jim says you get two decoy ferns

in silk or plastic, so as not to get dirt on the carpet

and because you don’t want to hang your love swing by the window

where a true living plant could grow.

The new guy bought it at the fantasy emporium

down by Pike Market, choosing the swing

over the hand-stitched ribbon underwear

sold in the boutique next door,

which cost a week’s wages. Jim held out his arms

to indicate the way she’ll hold the ropes—