Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo
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Versus the younger girls’ careful keeping
one hand pinned against their skirts, against
the nothing under them and their silk falling.
Skin
Back then it seemed that wherever a girl took off her clothes
the police would find her—
in the backs of cars or beside the dark night ponds, opening
like a green leaf across
some boy’s knees, the skin so taut beneath the moon
it was almost too terrible,
too beautiful to look at, a tinderbox, though she did not know.
But the men who came
beating the night rushes with their flashlights and thighs —
they knew. About Helen,
about how a body could cause the fall of Troy and the death
of a perfectly good king.
So they read the boy his rights and shoved him spread-legged
against the car
while the girl hopped barefoot on the asphalt, cloaked
in a wool rescue blanket.
Or sometimes girls fled so their fathers wouldn’t hit them,
their legs flashing as they ran.
And the boys were handcuffed just until their wrists had welts
and let off half a block from home.
God for how many years did I believe there were truly laws
against such things,
laws of adulthood: no yelling out of cars in traffic tunnels,
no walking without shoes,
no singing any foolish songs in public places. Or else
they could lock you in jail
or condemn your self and soul by telling both your lower-
and uppercase Catholic fathers.
And out of all these crimes, unveiling the body was of course
the worst, as though something
about the skin’s phosphorescence, its surface as velvet
as a deer’s new horn,
could drive not only men but civilization mad, could lead us
to unspeakable cruelties.
There were elders who from experience understood these things
much better than we.
And it’s true: remembering I had that kind of skin does drive me
half-crazy with loss.
Skin like the spathe of a broad white lily
on the first morning it unfurls.
Inseminator Man
When I call him back now, he comes dressed in the silver of memory,
silver coveralls and silver boots
and a silver hard hat that makes no sense.
The cows could not bombard his head,
though the Lilies and the Buttercups, the Jezebels and Mathildas,
avenged their lot in other ways
like kicking over a pail or stomping on his foot.
Blue welt, the small bones come unknitted,
the big toenail a black cicada peeling off its branch.
It wasn’t hard to understand their grudge, their harbor
of accumulated hurts —
imagine lugging those big tits everywhere, year after year.
Balloons full of wet concrete
hung between their legs like scrotums, duplicate and puffed.
I remember grappling with the nipples
like a teenage boy in a car’s backseat
and how the teats would always fill again before I could complete
their squeezing-out.
At night, two floors above them in the half-demolished barn,
my hands ached and made me dream of cows that drained
until the little stool rose off the ground and I found myself
dog-paddling in milk.
The summer after college I’d gone off to live with women
who’d forsworn straight jobs and underwear and men.
At night the ten of us linked hands
around a low wire-spool table before we took our meal of
vegetables and bread.
Afterward, from where the barn’s missing wall
opened out on Mad River, which had no banks but cut an oxbow
flush with the iridescent swale of the lower fields,
I saw women bathing, their flanks in the dim light
rising like mayflies born straight out of the river.
Everyone else was haying the lower field when he pulled up,
his van unmarked and streamlined like his wares:
vials of silvery jism from a bull named Festus
who — because he’d sired a Jersey that took first place
at the Vermont State Fair in ’53 —
was consigned to hurried couplings with an old maple stump
rigged up with white fur and a beaker.
When the man appeared I was mucking stalls in such heat
that I can’t imagine whether or not I would have worn
my shirt
or at what point it became clear to me that the bull Festus
had been dead for years.
I had this idea the world did not need men:
not that we would have to kill them personally,
but through our sustained negligence they would soon die off
like houseplants. When I pictured the afterlife
it was like an illustration in one of those Jehovah’s Witness magazines,
all of us, cows and women, marching on a promised land
colored that luminous green and disencumbered by breasts.
I slept in the barn on a pallet of fir limbs,
ate things I dug out of the woods,
planned to make love only with women, then changed my mind
when I realized how much they scared me.