Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo

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СКАЧАТЬ veils

      to drape over the telling

      where and how I grew, in a suburb

      with no men that I could in good conscience adorn

      with prosthetic limbs or even crushed straw hats?

      Kudzu was something we shouted

      jujitsuing air like the Green Hornet’s sidekick

      whose name still needed some time to ferment

      in those years separating the yellow peril

      from kung-fu mania, before BRUCE LEE

      floated up to the marquee lights.

      Like the stripers you could not eat

      floating on top of the poisonous river,

      to whose bank we never carried our burdens

      and let them weep down into Jersey.

      Because surely these words would have profited

      from at least one silo lording over,

      with some earthmoving equipment

      parked nearby in a nest of wire

      belonging to some good old boy named…

      what? Leldon? Lemuel? But sorry:

      in no barn did the whiskey bottles lie

      like Confederate casualties at Appomattox —

      no tent revivals, no cousins with red hair

      and freckled hands, no words as exotic as po’boy

      or chifforobe or muffuletta. Which meant

      we had no means to wrangle Beauty

      into the cathedrals of our mouths,

      though on occasion an ordinary cow

      could make the car’s eight-chambered heart

      stop dead beside a pasture, where none of us

      dared get out for fear of stampedes or hay fever

      or maybe even fangs hidden behind the lips.

      Call us ignorant: everything we knew poured out

      those two-at-a-time black-and-white TVS —

      one for picture, one for sound — & antlered

      with coat hangers that gave even Hawaii Five-O

      the speckling of constant winter. The snow

      fell like the fur of our fat white dog

      for whom my mother cooked lamb chops every night

      in an attempt to cure its baldness,

      while we dug our fingers in the chopmeat

      before she slapped it into patties.

      Then Star Trek came on. Then for an hour

      the men faded in and out of light.

      And there is nothing about this past

      it does any service to the language to recall:

      Art was what the fire department sold tickets to,

      raising money for the hook and ladder.

      It took place inside the school auditorium,

      where an old Italian couple hid

      by donning black and standing

      just outside the purple spotlight.

      Then music surged that was vaguely familiar

      though we’d fail to lure its elaborate name

      in from the borders of what we knew,

      while the marionette-swan bobbled to its feet

      as if newly born. I can say it now:

      Tchaikovsky. Of course, the whole time

      they worked the sticks and strings,

      the puppeteers stood right out in the open.

      Yet how silently they moved, how easy

      a thing they were to pretend we couldn’t see.

Foley

      It is Harrison Ford who just saved the world,

      but when he walks down a dirt road toward the ultralarge sun

      what sound like his boots are really bricks being drudged

      through a boxful of coffee beans. And the mare you’ve seen

      clopping along those nineteenth-century cobbles —

      she’s a coconut struck by a ball-peen hammer.

      And the three girls riding in the hansom,

      where the jouncing rustles their silk-and-bone:

      that’s a toothbrush moving across birchbark.

      Even the moment when one kickboxer’s perfect body

      makes contact with the other kickboxer’s perfect body

      has nothing to do with kickboxing, or bodies,

      but the concrete colliding with the abstract of perfection,

      which molts into a leather belt spanking a side of beef.

      This is the problem with movies:

      go to enough of them and pretty soon the world

      starts sounding wrongly synced against itself: e.g.,

      last night when I heard a noise below my bedroom window

      that sounded like the yowl a cat would make

      if its tongue were being yanked backward out its ass.

      Pain, I thought. Help, I thought,

      so at two a.m. I went outside with a flashlight

      and found a she-cat corkscrewed to a tom,

      both СКАЧАТЬ