Garfield’s Dream
Should we not know that James Garfield suffered from crippling writer’s block and simply could not finish his speech until 2:30 on the morning of the inaugural? As the day approached, he had an anxiety dream in which he fell off a canal boat and was suddenly standing naked in the wilderness during a wild storm. After finding a few pieces of cloth to cover himself and embarking on “a long and tangled journey,” he found his way to a house where “an old negro woman took me into her arms and nursed me as though I were a sick child.” Comforted, he awoke to face his presidency.
TED WIDMER, The American Scholar, WINTER 2005
Start with one cell, call it a zygote,
call it a diploid that turns into me — fool, petunia, witch.
Samaritan and crow. Endless nouns
I could plug in. And yet my eye
can be told from the world’s other billions of eyeballs
by machines that map the galaxy
of specks and glints that make up its blue ring.
Then how to account for Garfield’s dream
being the same one I’ve dreamed,
except the old woman had a child and the child held a doll
who was a replica of the child?
I think there’s a me in a black veil
who has dreamed it, too
(because the crow is a fool because the witch will presume),
as well as a me who’ll strap explosives to his chest
tomorrow, when he’ll blow himself back
into the disarray of cells.
Dear Assassin:
stay here with me in the dream—
we have only a few more hours of night
to be held together by neither our wife’s nor our mother’s arms.
Sylvia Plath’s Hair
for Marianne Boruch
In Bloomington, Indiana, the librarian lugged it from the archive
in a cardboard box, the kind that long-stemmed roses come in —
there was even tissue paper she unfolded
like someone parting a lover’s blouse
or like the skin of a corpse being peeled by a pathologist,
this librarian who wore white gloves
when she poked her eraser at the braid as if it might explode.
And I made a mental note to write but could not decide if I should start
with the waxy clots of follicle, or the bristle of split ends —
what word to describe the loose strands’ electrostatic web?
I start to write and wander into the tangle of my wondering
whatever happened to that yellow paper-mâché horse
displayed in our dining room where I grew from my pogo stick
into my humid secondary sexual characteristics?
Now it must fertilize a flower bed in some suburban subdivision
erected over the detoxified county dump.
Where rot the archives of the childhoods that we see
our therapists either to remember or to forget.
Because who has as much faith in the past as Sylvia Plath’s mother—
not to mention the muscle mass to lift the boxes?
And how many women leave Bloomington
with plans to write about the hair, which had a hint of purple
like the fuzz extruding from a thistle
when the flower after-blossoms on the green pineapplish nub?
Across America, women wad their paper asteroids
while dusty stallions are being pitched into the trash.
Pitched by widows moving into condominiums
because their daughters have skipped town. And we wonder
if they were just faking their pride in our poor creations,
with legs like bratwursts because I grew too excited
applying the paper strips like a trauma nurse.
Oh we are daughters without daddies
or sufficient antihistamines, drifting off to Bloomington
like spent weeds combing through the air.
Which reminds me — as per the static — how could I have lost it,
that word flyaway.
Trade Surplus
The whole waiting room
(Neurology Unit, seventh floor)
watches the balloon climb through the city, then turn
down a corridor leading to the sea.
Everyone looks.
And is joined in consensus
about the Happy Objects, overruling all elections.
Even the bad news does not come, not yet.
Later, the freeway:
when the dildo-franchise delivery truck speeds up
with two people painted on its side, sitting in bed
under the halos of their blissed-out brains—
I hoist my thumb like a good citizen.
But the driver has been trained by the corporation
(with a trendy slice of mirror on his eyes)
to sourpuss the glee through which he trolls his simulated genitalia.
Today the inanimate world rises up against him
as it hums without its batteries,
humming louder than the lightboard
where my cerebellum revealed its zones of mist
and its granules of (very bad) dark matter
over which Dr. Kita ran her lovely fingers.
Sixty miles, seven hawks,
after curling down the off-ramp
when the blue T. rex out front of Done-Rite Automotive
suddenly drops its head—
only then am I jabbed by one sharp astral needle.
Until the beast deflates
enough to reveal two men in the process of unpinioning
that vinyl dino with their greasy fingers.
Another day shot, death one spin closer
like the slice of pie that any luck might slide their way —
T. rex exhales one last blue breath,
and when the black palms wave, I wave.
About the Author
Lucia Perillo grew up in the suburbs of New York City in the 1960s. She graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1979 with a major in wildlife management and subsequently worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She then completed her M.A. in English at Syracuse University while working seasonally at Mount Rainier National Park.
In 1987 she moved to Olympia, Washington, where she taught at Saint Martin’s College. For most of the 1990s Perillo taught in the creative writing program at Southern Illinois University. She now lives back in Olympia with her husband and dog.
Acknowledgments
These poems first appeared in The American Poetry Review, Hunger Mountain, Indiana Review, Margie, The Mid-American Review, Narrative, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Northwest Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Subtropics, Sycamore Review, Tin House, TriQuarterly, and Willow Springs.
“Breaking News,” which first appeared in Hunger Mountain, was published as a broadside by Stinehour Press.
I am grateful to the MacArthur Foundation and Claremont Graduate School for encouraging my work through their generous support. Thanks also to Tim Kelly, Hayden Carruth, Jane Mead, and Ben Sonnenberg for their willingness to read drafts of these poems. I also want to say (contrary to those who rant against the American medical machine) that I couldn’t write anything at all were it not for the people who maintain my organic matter with such genuine concern. So thanks, docs.
And I thank the inmates at the Washington (State) Corrections Center for Women, who trained my dog.