Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo
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to bar a terror needing no window for entry:
it resides within. And where do we turn for protection
from our selves? My mother, for example, recommends marriage—
to a physician or some other wealthy healer. Of course
it’s him, leering from his station behind her shoulder,
who’s making her say such things: the witch doctor,
headhunter, the corporate shaman, his scalpel
drawn & ready, my scalp his ticket out.
First Job/Seventeen
Gambelli’s waitresses sometimes got down on their knees
searching for coins dropped into the carpet—
hair coiled and stiff, lips coated in that hennaed shade of red,
the banner-color for lives spent in the wake of husbands
dying without pensions, their bodies used in ceaseless
marching toward the kitchen’s mouth, firm legs
migrating slowly ankleward. From that doorway,
Frankie Gambelli would sic a booze-eye on them,
his arms flapping in an earthbound pantomime of that
other Frank: The Swooned-Over. “You old cunts,”
he’d mutter. “Why do I put up with you old cunts?”—
never managing to purge his voice’s tenor note
of longing. At me—the summer girl—he’d only stare
from between his collapsing red lids, eyes that were empty.
Once I got stiffed on a check when a man jerked
out of his seat, craned around, then bolted
from those subterranean women, sweaty and crippled
in the knees. Though I chased him up the stairs to the street,
the light outside was blinding and I lost the bastard
to that whiteness, and I betrayed myself with tears.
But coming back downstairs my eyes dried on another vision:
I saw that the dusk trapped by the restaurant’s plastic greenery
was really some residual light of that brilliance happening
above us on the street. Then for a moment the waitresses
hung frozen in midstride—cork trays outstretched—
like wide-armed, reeling dancers, the whole
some humming and benevolent machine that knew no past, no future—
only balanced glasses, and the good coin in the pocket.
Sinatra was singing “Jealous Lover.” All of us were young.
Dangerous Life
I quit med school when I found out the stiff they gave me
had book 9 of Paradise Lost and the lyrics
to “Louie Louie” tattooed on her thighs.
That morning as the wind was mowing
little ladies on a street below, I touched a Bunsen burner
to the Girl Scout sash whose badges were the measure of my worth:
Careers…
Cookery, Seamstress…
and Baby Maker… all gone up in smoke.
But I kept the merit badge marked Dangerous Life,
for which, if you remember, the girls were taken to the woods
and taught the mechanics of fire,
around which they had us dance with pointed sticks
lashed into crucifixes that we’d wrapped with yarn and wore
on lanyards round our necks, calling them our “Eyes of God.”
Now my mother calls the pay phone outside my walk-up, raving
about what people think of a woman — thirty, unsettled,
living on food stamps, coin-op Laundromats & public clinics.
Some nights I take my lanyards from their shoebox, practice baying
those old camp songs to the moon. And remember how they told us
that a smart girl could find her way out of anywhere, alive.
The Revelation
I hit Tonopah at sunset,
just when the billboards advertising the legal brothels
turn dun-colored as the sun lies
down behind the strip mine.
And the whores were in the Safeway,
buying frozen foods and Cokes
for the sitters before their evening shifts.
Yes they gave excuses to cut
ahead of me in line, probably wrote bad checks,
but still they were lovely at that hour,
their hair newly washed
and raveling. If you follow
any of the fallen far enough
— the idolaters, the thieves and liars —
you will find that beauty, a cataclysmic
beauty rising off the face of the burning landscape
just before the appearance of the beast, the beauty
that is the flower of our dying into another life.
Like a Möbius strip: you go round once
and you come out on the other side.
There is no alpha, no omega,
no beginning and no end.
Only the ceaseless swell
and fall of sunlight on these rusted hills.
Watch the way brilliance turns
on darkness. How can any of us be damned.
from
The Body Mutinies
(1996)
— The people are like wolves to me!
— You mustn’t say that, Kaspar.
Look at Florian — he lost his father in an accident, he is blind, but does he complain? No, he plays the piano the whole day and it doesn’t matter that his music sounds a little strange.
WERNER HERZOG
THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER
How Western Underwear Came to Japan
When Tokyo’s Shirokiya Dry Goods caught fire
in the thirties, shopgirls tore the shelves’ kimonos
and knotted them in ropes. Older women used
both hands, descending safely from the highest floors
though their underskirts flew up around their hips.
The crowded street saw everything beneath—
ankles,