In the autumn withering, the eyes of the children were noticeably shining, but I saw only the sidelong long-lashed white part of their eyes as they stepped up to the scope.
“Check out the wolves,” he said (the minutes ticking)
(the minutes nuzzling one another’s flanks)
(the minutes shining in the farthest portion of the field
as whatever emerged from it entered it again).
Pharaoh
In the saltwater aquarium at the pain clinic
lives a yellow tang
who chews the minutes in its cheeks
while we await our unguents and anesthesias.
The big gods offer us this little god
before the turning of the locks
in their Formica cabinets
in the rooms of our interrogation.
We have otherwise been offered magazines
with movie stars whose shininess
diminishes as the pages lose
their crispness as they turn.
But the fish is undiminishing, its face
like the death mask of a pharaoh,
which remains while the mortal face
gets disassembled by the microbes of the tomb.
And because our pain is ancient,
we too will formalize our rituals with blood
leaking out around the needle
when the big gods try but fail
to find the bandit vein. It shrivels when pricked,
and they’ll say I’ve lost it
and prick and prick until the trouble’s brought
to the pale side of the other elbow
from which I turn my head away—
but Pharaoh you do not turn away.
You watch us hump past with our walkers
with the tennis balls on their hind legs,
your sideways black eye on our going
down the corridor to be caressed
by the hand with the knife and the hand with the balm
when we are called out by our names.
Samara
At first they’re yellow butterflies
whirling outside the window—
but no: they’re flying seeds.
An offering from the maple tree,
hard to believe the earth-engine capable of such invention,
that the process of mutation and dispersal
will not only formulate the right equations
but that when they finally arrive they’ll be so
…giddy?
2.
Somewhere Darwin speculates that happiness
should be the outcome of his theory—
those who take pleasure
will produce offspring who’ll take pleasure,
though he concedes the advantage of the animal who keeps death in mind
and so is vigilant.
And doesn’t vigilance call for
at least an ounce of expectation,
imagining the lion’s tooth inside your neck already,
for you to have your best chance of outrunning the lion
on the arrival of the lion.
3.
When it comes time to “dedicate the merit”
my Buddhist friends chant from the ocean of samsara
may I free all beings—
at first I misremembered, and thought
the word for the seed the same.
Meaning “the wheel of birth and misery and death,”
nothing in between the birth and death but misery,
surely an overzealous bit of whittlework
on the part of Webster’s Third New International Unabridged
(though if you eliminate dogs and pie and swimming
feels about right to me—
oh shut up, Lucia. The rule is: you can’t nullify the world
in the middle of your singing).
4.
In the Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory
RoboSeed is flying.
The doctoral students have calculated
the correct thrust-to-weight ratio and heave dynamics.
On YouTube you can watch it flying in the moonlight
outside the engineering building with the fake Ionic columns.
I said “sorrow” for the fear that in the future all the beauties
will be replaced by replicas that have more glare and blare and bling.
RoboSeed, RoboRose, RoboHeart, RoboSoul—
this way there’ll be no blight
on any of the cherished encapsulations
when the blight was what we loved.
5.
They grow in chains from the bigleaf maple, chains
that lengthen until they break.
In June,
when the days are long and the sky is full
and the swept pile thickens
with the ones grown brown and brittle,
oh see how I’ve underestimated the persistence
of the lace in their one wing.
6.
Is there no slim chance I will feel it
when some molecule of me
(annealed by fire, like coal or glass)
is drawn up in the phloem of a maple
(please scatter my ashes under a maple)
so my speck can blip out
on a stem sprouting out of the fork of a branch,
the afterthought of a flower
that was the afterthought of a bud,
transformed now into a seed with a wing,
like the one I wore on the tip of my nose
back when I was green.
About the Author
Lucia Perillo’s fifth book of poems, Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon, 2009), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the Washington State Book Award and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize from the Library of Congress. Her book of stories, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain, will be published by Norton in 2012, and a book of her essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing, is out in paperback from Trinity University Press.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications, in which these poems first appeared:
The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Barrow Street, Kenyon Review Online, The Los Angeles Review, New England Review, The New Yorker, Orion, Ploughshares, Poetry, Rio Grande Review, Salt Hill, Seneca Review, Southern California Review, Subtropics, Tin House, and Voices in Italian Americana.
Copyright 2012 by Lucia Perillo
Cover art: Giotto di Bondone, detail from The Last
Judgement, ca. 1305.
Photo credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.
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