Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo

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СКАЧАТЬ the grass whose damp was already wicking

      through my slippers. Aaah… love, I thought,

      or some distantly cousined feline analogue of love,

      or the feline analogue of the way love came out of the radio

      in certain sixties pop songs that had the singer keening

      antonyms: how can something so right feel so wrong,

      so good hurt so bad… you know what I’m talking about.

      And don’t you think it’s peculiar:

      in the first half of the sixties they made the black girl-groups

      sing with white accents and in the second half of the sixties

      they made the white girl-groups sing with black accents,

      which proves that what you hear is always

      some strange alchemy of what somebody thinks you’ll pay for

      and what you expect. Love in particular

      it seems to me we’ve never properly nailed down

      so we’ll know it when we hear it coming, the way

      screaming “Fire!” means something to the world.

      I remember this guy who made noises against my neck

      that sounded like when after much tugging on a jar lid

      you stick a can opener under its lip—that little tsuck.

      At first I thought this must be

      one of love’s least common dialects, though later

      when I found the blue spots all over I realized

      it was malicious mischief, it was vandalism, it was damage.

      Everybody has a story about the chorus of these,

      love’s faulty hermeneutics: the muffler in retreat

      mistaken for the motor coming, the declaration

      of loathing construed as the minor reproach;

      how “Babe, can I borrow five hundred bucks?”

      gets dubbed over “Goodbye, chump”—of course,

      of course, and you slap your head but it sounds funny,

      not enough sizzle, not enough snap. If only

      Berlitz had cracked the translations or we had conventions

      like the international code of semaphores;

      if only some equivalent of the Captain Midnight decoder ring

      had been muscled across the border. As it has

      for my friend who does phone sex

      because it’s a job that lets her keep at her typewriter all day,

      tapping out poems. Somehow she can work

      both sides of her brain simultaneously, the poem

      being what’s really going on and the sex being what sounds

      like what’s going on; the only time she stops typing

      is when she pinches her cheek away from her gums,

      which is supposed to sound like oral sex

      though she says it’s less that it really sounds like oral sex

      than that these men have established a pact, a convention

      that permits them to believe it sounds like oral sex.

      When they know

      it’s a woman pinching her cheek and not a blow job,

      it’s a telephone call and not a blow job,

      it’s a light beam whistling down a fiber, for god’s sake,

      and not a blow job. Most days I’m amazed

      we’re not all schizophrenics, hearing voices

      that have been edited out of what calls to us

      from across the fourth wall. I’ve heard

      that in To Have and Have Not Lauren Bacall’s singing

      comes from the throat of a man; also that Bart Simpson is really

      a middle-aged woman; and last week not once but twice

      I heard different women wailing

      in public parking lots, the full throttle

      of unrestrained grief, and both times I looked straight at them

      and pretended nothing unusual was going on,

      as though what I was hearing were only the sound of air

      shrieking through the spoiler on someone’s Camaro.

      That’s also part of the pact my friend’s talking about,

      not to offer condolence, not to take note.

      You don’t tell the men they’re sorry creatures,

      you don’t ask the women what went wrong.

      If you’re being mugged or raped or even killed

      you have to scream “Fire!” instead of “Help!”

      to get someone to help you. Though soon, if not already,

      all the helpers will have caught on

      and then you’ll have to start screaming something else,

      like that you’ve spotted Bacall or Harrison Ford on the street,

      Bart Simpson even—no wait a minute, he’s not real,

      though I remember a time when even the president talked about him

      as if he were human. It’s not the sleaziness

      of phone sex I bristle at, but rather the way it assists

      the world in becoming imprecise

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