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.
Avoidance Behavior
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.
Postcard from Florida
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.
Transcendentalism
The professor stabbed his chest with his hands curled like forks
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.
I felt bad about his class’s being such a snoozefest, though peaceful too,
a quiet little interlude from everyone outside
rooting up the corpse of literature
for being too Caucasian. There was a simple answer
to my own question (how come no one loved me,
stomping on the pedals of my little bicycle):
I was insufferable. So, too, was Emerson I bet,
though I liked If the red slayer think he slays—
the professor drew a giant eyeball to depict the Over-soul.
Then he read a chapter from his own book:
naptime.
He didn’t care if our heads tipped forward on their stalks.
When spring came, he even threw us a picnic in his yard
where dogwood bloomed despite a few last
dirty bergs of snow. He was a wounded animal
being chased across the tundra by those wolves,
the postmodernists. At any moment
you expected to see blood come dripping through his clothes.
And I am I who never understood his question,
though he let me climb to take a seat
aboard the wooden scow he’d been building in the shade
of thirty-odd years. How I ever rowed it
from his yard, into my life — remains a mystery.
The work is hard because the eyeball’s heavy, riding in the bow.
Final Leap
When the Black Elvis takes the stage, five of him appear—
start with the man in his white jumpsuit,
then add the jumbo projection behind,
throw in a replication of his replicated feet
plus two copies of his shadow. Though he is five,
he has never been ranked #1
because he does not look like Elvis, which is true:
his voice is more soulful than anyother Elvi
but the judges at the yearly Memphis finals
will not close their eyes and make that final leap.
Not so for the women here, who can frog
the leap still one bounce farther
until a spirit descends and the dead man
lives. It is a little troubling
how much the pageant resembles a Catholic mass
when the women approach as he descends
the stage’s steps, bell-bottoms aflutter
around the doves of his white boots.
Then he drapes a satin strip around their necks.
Then comes the Amen of their swoons.
As for me, I don’t see why a spirit
would deign to enter the body again
when you consider bloat colitis amphetamines etc.
and the final humiliations of the toilet.
Me, I’d prefer to be housed in a ghost
as I’d also prefer that Robert Washington
not wear the electric guitar around his neck
when it is not plugged in. But the scarves
have plugged in these women, who sound
as if they
too have been amplified by five, forming one
big animal body my soul just might deign
to descend into. For the plain speech
of its snarls and yips: we are housed
in fur and we’re housed in heat—
we are dogs tied to trees, at the end of a leap
before the lights come up and we are yanked back by our chains.
NOTE: Robert Washington did win the 2003
Images of Elvis contest, after I wrote this poem.
January/Macy’s/The Bra Event
Word of it comes whispered by a slippery thin section
of the paper, where the models pantomime unruffled tête-à-têtes
despite the absence of their blouses.
Each year when my familiar latches on them so intently
like a grand master plotting the white queen’s path,
like a baby trying to suckle a whole roast beef,
I ask: What, you salt block, are you dreaming
about being clubbed by thunderheads? — but he will not say.
Meanwhile Capricorn’s dark hours flabbed me,
uneasy about surrendering to the expert fitter
(even if the cupped hands were licensed and bonded)—
I had August in mind, seeing the pygmy goats at the county fair.
Now the sky is having its daily rain event
and the trees are having their hibernal bark event,
pretending they feel unruffled
despite the absence of their leaves. And we forget how they looked
all flouncy and green. Instead we regard
fearfully the sway of their old trunks.
Odor Ode
Big stink wobbles down the library aisles
from you endomorphs who’ve come in from the thorns—
your musk percolates the picture books
while children sing to the donkey Tingalayo.
It creeps into the reference nook
and biographies of despot popes,
the manuals on car repair, even the old edition Joy of Sex,
the one whose hairy armpits haunt me.
How will the smudge of rotten leaves
ever be lifted from so many paperbackèd bosoms,
the baby doze peacefully in its holster, the ancestors spring
from the accordion-files in their old hats?
Outside, the slacker deer refuse to rut
ever since your scent made its bed on the lawn,
the Chamber of Commerce outraged and
the mayor mowing down the brambles.
Sleep safe here, men! — with your heads tipped back,
wooden newspaper spindles across your chests like swords
while those good Samaritans the moths
knit scarves from the wool of your loud roars and whistles.
Viagra
Let the dance begin.
In magazine-land, you two are dancing—
though a moment ago you were engaged
in some activity like stringing fenceline
or baling hay — why else the work gloves
sticking up from your back pockets?
In a whirlwind of pollen, you-the-man
have seized you-the-woman to your breast
— his breast, her breast, tenderly, tenderly—
now you turn away and shyly grin.
Oh you possessors of youthful haircuts
& attractive activewear from L.L. Bean,
you whose buttocks are still small enough
to permit the rearview photograph:
don’t you already have enough silver coinage
pouring from life’s slot? But no, you also want
the river’s silver surge where its bed drops off,
you want the namesake in all its glory—Niagara:
even the barge of animals teetering on its lip.
This ploy was wrought by some 19th-century huckster,
the honeymooners gathered on the shore’s high bank
to watch the barge drop as creature-cries
rise up…
before all the couples re-bungalow themselves
to do what, then what, it’s hard to imagine
after so much death. I always thought Tigers
until I read the barge was full of dogs and cats—
one baby camel, a demented old monkey,
la petite mort, that little French whimper
given up by the ordinary before it breaks into splinters.
The widow Taylor straps herself in a barrel
and rides it safely over the century’s cusp,
& Maud Willard imbarrels herself with her dog
who’ll leap from the busted staves alone.
Still, wouldn’t the ride be worth that one live leap—
doesn’t part of us want to be broken to bits?
After all, our bodies are what cage us,
what keep us, while, outside, the river
says more, wants more, is more: the R
(
grrrr, argh, graa…) in all its variegated coats.
A sound always coming, always smashing, always spoken
by the silver teeth and tongue that guard the river’s open throat.
The Van with the Plane
At first I didn’t get it: I thought it was just scrap metal roped on the roof
of this dented ancient Econoline van
with its parrot-yellow-colored burden.
Bright mishmash so precarious
my heart twitched whenever I had to tail it down the road
until one day I woke to it: you blockhead, that’s a plane.
I don’t know how I missed it — of course it was a plane,
disassembled, with one yellow wing pointing sideways from the roof.
Fuselage dinged by rocks from the road
and two little wheels sticking up from the van—
now when I tally all the pieces, it seems pretty obvious.
And I wonder if toting it around would be a burden
or more some kind of anti-burden.
Because if you drove around with a plane
you might feel less fettered than the rest of us:
say your life hung around your neck like a concrete Elizabethan ruff
you could always ditch that junker van
and take off rattling down the runway of the road.
But my friends said they’d seen that heap for so long on the road
it was like a knock-knock joke heard twice too often.
You’ll be sorry they said when I went looking for the guy who drove the van,
whom I found in the library, beating the dead horse of his plane.
Once you got him started it was hard to shut him off:
how, if he had field to rise from, he’d fly to Sitka, or Corvallis—
but how does a guy living in a van get a field, you think the IRS
just goes around giving people fields for free? The road
of his thought was labyrinthine and sometimes ended in the rough
of Cambodia or Richard Nixon.
He said a plane in pieces still counts as a plane,
it was still a good plane, it was just a plane on a van.
And of course I liked him better as part and parcel of the van;
the actual guy could drive you nuts.
All his grace depended on his sitting underneath that plane
as it rattles up and down the road
like a train with a missile, a warhead of heavy hydrogen.
Because the van reverts to rubble once the plane takes off.
And if my own life is a plane, it’s like the Spirit of St. Louis—
no windshield, just the vantage of a periscope.
Forward, onward, never look down — at the burden of these roofs and roads.
Snowstorm with Inmates and Dogs
The prison kennel’s tin roof howls
while the dogs romp outside through the flakes.
The
inmates trained a dog to lift my legs—
for months they rolled the concrete floor
in wheelchairs, simulating.
Through a window I watch them cartwheel now,
gray sweatpants rising against the whitened hill
traversed by wire asterisks and coils.
At first I feared they pitied me,
the way I flinched at the building’s smell.
Now the tin roof howls, the lights go off
to the sound of locking doors. Go on, breathe—
no way the machinery of my lungs
is going to plow the county road.
Didn’t I try to run over a guy,
spurned love being the kindling stick that rubbed
against his IOUs? Easy to land here,
anyone could — though I think laughter
would elude me, no matter what the weather.
Compared to calculating how far to the road.
Signs there say: CORRECTIONS CENTER DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS.
My instructions were: Accept no notes or photographs,
and restrict the conversation to such topics as
how to teach the dog to nudge
the light switch with his nose.
Now the women let their snowballs fly — as if
the past were a simple matter that could splat and melt.
Only my red dog turns his head
toward the pines beyond the final fence
before the generator chugs to life.
Early Cascade
I couldn’t have waited. By the time you return
it would have rotted on the vine.
So I cut the first tomato into eighths,
salted the pieces in the dusk,
and found the flesh not mealy (like last year)
or bitter,
even when I swallowed the green crown of the stem
that made my throat feel dusty and warm.
Pah. I could have gagged on the sweetness.
The miser accused by her red sums.
Better had I eaten the dirt itself
on this the first night in my life
when I have not been too busy for my loneliness—
at last, it comes.
Twenty-five Thousand Volts per Inch
The weird summer of lightning (to be honest) was not a summer, but a week
when we sat every night in a far corner of the yard
to watch the silver twitch over our drinks.
It may help to know the sky hardly ever spasms here,
which is why we savored the postscript smell of nickel,
ions crisping in the deep fry.
The bolts made everything erogenous, the poppies and the pumpkin vine—
we could hardly bear to leave our watch post
but had tickets for the concert at the pier.
And we could not bear to miss the jam band from our youth,
which we feared discovering lacked talent and looked foolish