Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      Not yet did we have personalities to interfere

      with what we were: two sisters, two brothers.

      Maybe our parents really were people who walked in the world,

      were mean or kind, but you’d have to prove it to us.

      They were the keepers of money, the signers of report cards,

      the drivers of cars. We had a station wagon.

      Back home we even had a dog, who was fed

      by a neighbor kid while we toured the Jersey shore.

      We waded in the motel pool and clung

      to the edge of the deep end, because we couldn’t swim.

      Maybe that’s why we never went in the ocean, despite

      hours of driving. We could’ve just gone down the block!

      Yet each year we made a ritual of this week

      spent yelling and cursing and swatting each other,

      with none of the analyses we now employ, the past

      used as ammunition, the glosses from our latest therapist.

      Back then a sock in the jaw could set anyone straight.

      On Sunday afternoon, the homeward traffic would grind still

      where the turnpike bottlenecked. My father

      would slam his forehead against the steering wheel,

      start changing lanes and leaning on the horn.

      Without breeze through the window, the car would hold

      our body heat like an iron skillet, skin peeling

      from our burned shoulders as we hurled pretzels

      and gave the finger to kids stopped in cars beside us.

      My mother wouldn’t mention the turn we’d missed

      a few miles back; instead she’d fold the map

      and jam it resolutely in the glove box while we crept on.

      Perhaps this was our finest hour, as the people

      we were becoming took shape and began to emerge:

      the honkers of horns and the givers of fingers.

      After the sun turned red and disappeared, we rolled

      through darkness, wondering if the world knew all its names:

      Wickatunk, Colts Neck, Zarephath, Spotswood — in every town

      there were houses, in every house there’s a light.

Limits

      The dead man.

      Every now and again, I see him.

      And the wildlife refuge where I worked then,

      the shallow ponds of Leslie Salt Company

      patchworking the San Francisco Bay edges

      and spreading below the hills like broken tiles,

      each pond a different color — from blue to green

      to yellow until finally the burnished red

      of terra-cotta, as the water grew denser

      and denser with salt. Dunlins blew upward

      like paper scraps torn from a single sheet,

      clouds of birds purling in sunlight, harboring

      the secret of escaped collision. And

      that other mystery: how these weightless tufts

      could make it halfway to Tierra del Fuego

      and back before spring’s first good day.

      On those good days, a group from the charity ward

      named after the state’s last concession to saints

      would trudge up the hill to the visitor center,

      where I’d show them California shorebirds

      — a stuffed egret, western sandpiper, and avocet —

      whose feathers were matted and worn to shafts

      from years of being stroked like puppies.

      As I guided their hands over the pelts

      questions stood on my tongue — mostly

      about what led them to this peculiar life,

      its days parceled into field trips

      and visits to the library for picture books

      with nurses whose enthusiasms were always greater

      than their own. Their own had stalled out

      before reaching the moist surface of their eyes,

      some of the patients fitting pigeonholes built

      in my head, like Down syndrome and hydrocephalus.

      But others were not marked in any way,

      and their defects cut closer to the bones

      under my burnt-sienna ranger uniform.

      Maybe I was foolish to believe in escape

      from the future carried in their uncreased palms:

      our lives overseen by the strict, big-breasted nurse

      who is our health or our debts or even

      our children, the her who is always putting crayons

      and lumps of clay in our hands, insisting

      we make our lives into some crude but useful thing.

      And one day a man, a patient who must have been

      supervised by his strict heart, fell down

      suddenly and hard, on his way up the hill.

      Two nurses prodded him on toward the building,

      where he went down again like a duffel bag full of earth

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