Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo

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СКАЧАТЬ blood tests?

      (Too many to count.)

      Add all the sticks up and they come down to this: either

      your coming out clean

      or else… well, nobody’s talking

      about the B-side,

      an or else that plows through your life like a combine

      driven at stock-car speed,

      shucking the past into two piles: things that mattered

      and things that didn’t.

      And the first pile looks so small when you think of

      everything you haven’t done —

      never seeing the Serengeti or Graceland, never running

      with the bulls in Spain.

      Not to mention all the women you haven’t done yet!—

      and double that number of breasts.

      Okay—

      you’ve got a woman, a good woman, make no mistake.

      But how come you get just one woman when you’re getting

      many lifetimes’ worth of sticks?

      Where is the justice in that? You feel like someone

      who’s run out of clean clothes

      with laundry day still half a week away; all those women

      you tossed in the pile

      marked things that didn’t matter, now you can’t help but

      drag them out.

      Like the blond on trail crew who lugged the chain saw

      on her shoulder up a mountain

      and bucked up chunks of blighted trees — how could you

      have forgotten

      how her arms quaked when the saw whined and the muscles

      went liquid in her quads,

      or the sweaty patch on her chest where a mosaic formed

      of shiny flies and moss?

      Or that swarthy-haired dancer, her underpants hooked

      across her face like the Lone Ranger,

      the one your friends paid to come to the table, where

      she pawed and made you blush:

       How come yer getting married when you could be muff-diving

       every night?

      At college they swore it was John Dewey, they swore

      by the quadruped Rousseau,

      and it took cancer to step up and punch your gut

      before you figured

      that all along immortal truth’s one best embodiment

      was just

      some sixteen-year-old table-dancing on a forged ID

      at Ponders Corners.

      You should have bought a red sports car, skimmed it under

      the descending arms at the railroad crossing,

      the blond and brunette beside you under its moonroof

      and everything smelling of leather —

      yes yes—this has been your flaw: how you have always

      turned away from the moment

      your life was about to be stripped so the bone of it

      lies bare and glittering.

      You even tried wearing a White Sox cap to bed but its bill

      nearly put your wife’s eye out.

      So now you’re left no choice but going capless, scarred;

      you must stand erect;

      you must unveil yourself as a bald man in that most

      treacherous darkness.

      You remember the first night your parents left town, left

      you home without a sitter.

      Two friends came over and one of them drove the Mercury

      your dad had parked stalwartly

      in the drive (you didn’t know how yet) — took it down

      to some skinny junkie’s place

      in Wicker Park, cousin of a friend of a cousin, friend

      of a cousin of a friend,

      what did it matter but that his name was Sczabo.

      Sczabo! —

      as though this guy were a skin disease, or a magician

      about to make doves appear.

      What he did was tie off your friends with a surgical tube,

      piece of lurid chitterling

      smudged with grease along its length. Then needle, spoon —

      he did the whole bit,

      it was just like in the movies, only your turn turned you

      chicken (or were you defiant? — )

      Somebody’s got to drive home, and that’s what you did

      though you’d never

      made it even as far as the driveway’s end before your dad

      put his foot over the transmission hump

      to forestall some calamity he thought would compromise

      the hedges.

      All the way back to Evanston you piloted the Mercury

      like General Montgomery in his tank,

      your friends huddled in the backseat, spines coiled,

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