I walked them back outside two at a time
and opened my fists, where the birds paused
just long enough to leave their own data on my palms.
Here’s what we think of
your spangles, your starlight. Then the night flushed
them up into its swoon — however faintly,
the corn glittered as the birds resumed their ravening.
IN VITRO/ IN VIVO
Only once did the frog come to mind: when the coroner
came to “first-aid training” at the fire station,
his slide carousel set up to eliminate
the easy pukers. The frog was not dead
but its brain had been pithed, which is what happens
when you stick a probe into the skull and wiggle.
You wind up with something dead enough
to let you stretch its tongue as thin and wide
as a cellophane sheet, which I did so
eagerly, back in the lab. The coroner said:
Here is the fat guy whose Chihuahua
gnawed through his stomach. Click.
Here is the farmer who hanged himself in his silo.
(I noted his foreshortened dangling feet.) Click.
It had been thrilling to see the frog’s blood cells
jerking through the narrow capillaries. Here
is the woman who swallowed the bottle of Drāno.
Click. Here is the man who just Sawzall-ed
his neck clean through. Click. Here is the guy
who shot off his head, but wait: he’s still living,
which is what happens if the brain stem’s left intact.
Click. The coroner said we should aim for the base
not the top of the skull and remember to turn down
the heat. Click. There are many people in this world
on whom nobody checks in very often. Click.
The warmer the room, the quicker a body
will turn black and bloat. Click.
If you have a dog it is important to leave out
what seems like an inordinate amount of dog food.
Click, click, then there was nothing
but a slab of light to signal he was through.
And it was then that I remembered the frog,
not that the coroner had spoken of frogs.
What he said was,
If we saw the cops outside, smoking cigars,
that’s when we’d know we had a stinker.
SIMILAR GIRL
Most of the hospital’s emergencies lay
on gurneys that made a chickadee noise—
eent eent eent—as they rolled on rubber wheels.
But the girl with the bellyache just walked in
clinging tight to her purse, protecting the pain,
as if she feared its being kicked.
Meanwhile an old woman whimpered in the next room
help me, god help me—here’s the main thing I learned:
if trouble comes with an odor,
everyone scrams. That’s how it was in the ER
where I ghosted the halls, for the red appliqué
the college ambulance corps wore on its sleeve—
I would rescue the beauties
who jumped off the campus walkway bridge
and lay on the pavement like old flowers pressed in books.
In the kitchenette lounge, one surly doc asked:
So who’s going to tell her she’s knocked up?
— cut to the girl who’d been waiting for hours
lit by a long bulb flickering out.
As for the doctors, well it would be easy
to harp on their chuckling, or sneer at the gum
they snapped with the vampire prongs of their teeth
or the way they used cold half-cups of coffee
to drown their cigarettes. But it was they
who called me to press on the man
whose heart had run through the course of its years,
millions of spasms in the box of his ribs—
later, on my doughnut napkin
I would calculate: a quarter billion.
And though they made fun of the similar girl,
they brought in a step stool for me to climb on
for the minutes required for their clean consciences
to declare him dead. (Six.) Their jimmy-legs tapped
as they studied the clock, while I studied the chest
bending under my palms
while the old woman cried help me, god help me,
and the young one hugged her purse like a doll
while tick tick tick, the miraculous ticking of ticks:
life ratcheted up inside her.
Two of the Furies
The old woman in the parking lot
lank and without style, hanging
under her ski hat, as I wear a ski hat—
her legs bare under her skirt,
my legs bare under my skirt,
she wears sneakers, I wear sneakers—
windbreaker, windbreaker. She rolls up
to watch me board, as people do,
because it is interesting
to see the wheelchair maneuvered backward
into the van. You got it?
she asks, as people do
though I am not their child.
We are not sisters either,
despite the wind’s ruffling our skirts in sync—
oh how she is interested in the ruffling of my skirt.
The ruffle makes her giddy, starts
her bald gums racing on their wordless observations
as she peers into my thighs.
How alike we are! says this
no-sister of mine to be argued with,
just some crazy old woman
flashing the terrible crater of her smile
to raise the wind and
prove her point.
Juárez
At night the bones move where the animals take them,
bones of the girls that once were girls,
the hand-bones missing, you know how it goes,
you fill in the blank, the unimaginable X
of horrid futures. From bus stops
before dawn, from outside the maquiladoras
when the horizon bites the sun’s gold coin,
from the hundred places to fail to arrive at
or return from, the bones uncouple
their linkages and travel separate ways.
Too many of them for just one theory—
too many skulls for the drug lords even,
for the husbands the satanists the cross-border whore-killers
…until you start to suspect the dirt itself.
Between the concrete wall and the drainage ditch,
the sheet-metal scraps and collapsed storm fence,
a desert of ocotillo scrub, not even one decent
cowboy cactus, one bent arm
swearing an oath of truth. When I was younger
I wrote this poem many times and don’t know
where I was going with it: so much worship
for every speck of mica giving off
a beam I made into a blade. And you can see
how I turned mere rocks into villains
when it turns out the landscape’s not at fault,
the parched land a red herring — this is not the song
of how the men fried while hiding inside the boxcar
(and even then someone outside locked the door).
My poems took place where the wind-skids sang:
perhaps I’ve been too fond of railroad tracks
and the weedy troughs alongside them, which do
accept most everything. Especially the spikes,
how I loved those spikes cast into silence,
in this case behind the factories, where the grass
grows sparser than in the poor soils of
Texas,
a place with completely different ghosts
lying just over the river. To get there
you will have to pass by a large pink cross
made out of such spikes at the border station,
and here’s the main thing, forgive me, I missed in my youth:
how from each spike hangs a name.
Incubus
While the spectacular round butt of the fat junkie sitting on the curb
rotated upward from his belt—
the legs of the skinny junkie wriggled upward from a dumpster.
And when he stood, I saw
his familiar figure, thinned—
two times he’d snipped my kitchen with the scissors of his hips
while he directed stories from the rehab clinic toward us
ladies in our panty hose,
our fingers sliding up and down our wineglass stems.
Later, in the cloak of his jean jacket,
he slipped upstairs and stole my pharmaceuticals,
my legitimate pharmaceuticals!—
so an awkwardness descended on the realm of gestures
there in the alley behind the YMCA, where I looked at any alternate—
pothole, hydrant, not buttocks,
don’t look at buttocks, don’t look at dumpster, don’t. Look:
I would have been a crone to him,
and he would have been my pirate son,
my son who sleeps beneath the bridge
in the cloak of his jean jacket, dabbed with fecal matter now.
Still, when he comes at night,
brass button by button
and blade by blade — his skinny thighs—
I open myself like a medicine cabinet
and let him take the pill bottles from my breasts.
First Epistle of Lucia to Her Old Boyfriends
Not infrequently I find myself wondering which of you are dead
now that it’s been so long since I have had a boyfriend
for whom this wonder would be a somewhat milder version of
the way our actual parting went — i.e., with me not wondering
but outright wishing that an outright lightning bolt
would sail sharply into your thick heads.
Can I plead youth now over malign intent?
And does my moral fiber matter anyhow
since I have not gone forth and et cetera’d—
i. e., doesn’t my absent children’s nondepletion of the ozone layer
give me some atmospheric exchange credits under the Kyoto Protocol
to release the fluorocarbons of these unkind thoughts?
Anyhow what is the likelihood of you old boyfriends reading this
even if you are not dead? Be assured your end is hypothetical.
Also be assured I blush most furiously
whenever that tower room in Ensenada comes to mind
where the mescal functioned as an exchange credit for those lies you told
about your Alford pleas and your ex-wives who turned out not ex at all.
Anyhow the acid rain has caused my lightning to go limp
over bungalows where you have partial custody of your teenagers
and AA affirmations magneted to the fridge
from which your near beers sweat as you wonder if I’m dead,
since the exchange for this-here wonder is your wonder about me.
Even though it shows my nerve — to think you’d think of me at all—
I await word of your undeadness
P.S. along with your mild version of my just reward.
Raised Not by Wolves
The family sank into its sorrows—
we softened like noodles in a pot.
Whereas the bicycle’s bones were painted gold
and stood firm against the house
no matter how hard it rained.
Beneath the handlebar mount, it said royal in red letters
unscathed despite the elements;
this was the bicycle’s first lesson,
to be royal and unscathed—
I pressed my ear-cup to the welds.
Pedal furiously, then coast in silence.
You will need teeth to grab the chain.
Exhortations with the stringent priggishness of Zen,
delivered by a guru who hauls you off and wallops you
in answer to your simple question.
Though its demise is foggy,
I can conjure with precision its rebukes, the dull sting
when the boy-bar bashed my private place.
Then no talking was permitted
beyond one stifled yelp.
You could, however, rub the wound
with the meat of your thumb — so long
as you did this stealthily, pretending you had an itch.
Amphicar
Amphicar rolls across the breakfast table
as the happy family plunges into the river—
don’t worry. I’ve just trolled them from the river
of human news. Today’s lifestyle feature:
this convertible that once topped my desires,
all my crackpot desires
(my parents would not buy one to drive the filthy current).
Instead we rode a station wagon into our oblivion,
when we could have ridden into our oblivion
with the means of rescue. In the famous myths
how many souls got banished to the underworld
(or turned into trees, their arms the branches whorled)
and were doomed because they let themselves be driven
over death’s river (or into the tree)
without a plan for their re-entry
into living human form? In my actual river I never stepped down
because, the myth went, its bottom was shit,
and when the mayor confessed it was actual shit
the world proved itself to be a sluice of lies
even if the water was blue
or sort of blue.
Amphicar would have wheeled right through it,
manufactured ’61 through ’68, the years of my youth
(my banished-to-the-back-of-the-station-wagon youth),
with no propeller or white leather seats,
no top rolled down, no fishing pole slanting up.
No one listened to me: how we could just drive up
on the shores of Hell, and tan on that beach for a while.
If we only had an Amphicar. Then when we grew sick for home
we could have crossed back home.
Job Site, 1967
Brick laid down, scritch of the trowel’s
downward stroke, another brick set
then the flat side of the trowel moving
across the top of the course of bricks.
My father stepped from the car in his brown loafers,
the rest of him is fading but not his loafers,
the round spot distended by his big toe.
Brick laid down, scritch of the trowel’s
downward stroke, the silver bulb of the door lock
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.
Wormhole Theory
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