Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo

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СКАЧАТЬ the Girl Scout sash whose badges were the measure of my worth:

      Careers…

      Cookery, Seamstress…

      and Baby Maker… all gone up in smoke.

      But I kept the merit badge marked Dangerous Life,

      for which, if you remember, the girls were taken to the woods

      and taught the mechanics of fire,

      around which they had us dance with pointed sticks

      lashed into crucifixes that we’d wrapped with yarn and wore

      on lanyards round our necks, calling them our “Eyes of God.”

      Now my mother calls the pay phone outside my walk-up, raving

      about what people think of a woman — thirty, unsettled,

      living on food stamps, coin-op Laundromats & public clinics.

      Some nights I take my lanyards from their shoebox, practice baying

      those old camp songs to the moon. And remember how they told us

      that a smart girl could find her way out of anywhere, alive.

The Revelation

      I hit Tonopah at sunset,

      just when the billboards advertising the legal brothels

      turn dun-colored as the sun lies

      down behind the strip mine.

      And the whores were in the Safeway,

      buying frozen foods and Cokes

      for the sitters before their evening shifts.

      Yes they gave excuses to cut

      ahead of me in line, probably wrote bad checks,

      but still they were lovely at that hour,

      their hair newly washed

      and raveling. If you follow

      any of the fallen far enough

      — the idolaters, the thieves and liars —

      you will find that beauty, a cataclysmic

      beauty rising off the face of the burning landscape

      just before the appearance of the beast, the beauty

      that is the flower of our dying into another life.

      Like a Möbius strip: you go round once

      and you come out on the other side.

      There is no alpha, no omega,

      no beginning and no end.

      Only the ceaseless swell

      and fall of sunlight on these rusted hills.

      Watch the way brilliance turns

      on darkness. How can any of us be damned.

from

       The Body Mutinies

      (1996)

      — The people are like wolves to me!

      — You mustn’t say that, Kaspar.

      Look at Florian — he lost his father in an accident, he is blind, but does he complain? No, he plays the piano the whole day and it doesn’t matter that his music sounds a little strange.

      WERNER HERZOG

       THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER

How Western Underwear Came to Japan

      When Tokyo’s Shirokiya Dry Goods caught fire

      in the thirties, shopgirls tore the shelves’ kimonos

      and knotted them in ropes. Older women used

      both hands, descending safely from the highest floors

      though their underskirts flew up around their hips.

      The crowded street saw everything beneath—

      ankles, knees, the purple flanges of their sex.

      Versus the younger girls’ careful keeping

      one hand pinned against their skirts, against

      the nothing under them and their silk falling.

Skin

      Back then it seemed that wherever a girl took off her clothes

      the police would find her—

      in the backs of cars or beside the dark night ponds, opening

      like a green leaf across

      some boy’s knees, the skin so taut beneath the moon

      it was almost too terrible,

      too beautiful to look at, a tinderbox, though she did not know.

      But the men who came

      beating the night rushes with their flashlights and thighs —

      they knew. About Helen,

      about how a body could cause the fall of Troy and the death

      of a perfectly good king.

      So they read the boy his rights and shoved him spread-legged

      against the car

      while the girl hopped barefoot on the asphalt, cloaked

      in a wool rescue blanket.

      Or sometimes girls fled so their fathers wouldn’t hit them,

      their legs flashing as they ran.

      And the boys were handcuffed just until their wrists had welts

      and let off half a block from home.

      God for how many years did I believe there were truly laws

      against such things,

      laws of adulthood: no yelling out of cars in traffic tunnels,

      no СКАЧАТЬ