Lucia Perillo
On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths
For all the Roberts
No death for you. You are involved.
The Second Slaughter
Achilles slays the man who slew his friend, pierces the corpse
behind the heels and drags it
behind his chariot like the cans that trail
a bride and groom. Then he lays out
a banquet for his men, oxen and goats
and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat
until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.
The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—
in the morning more animals must be killed
for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds
no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;
not even heaving four stallions on the pyre
can lift the ballast of his sorrow.
And here I turn my back on the epic hero— the one who slits
the throats of his friend’s dogs,
killing what the loved one loved
to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent
by vanishing from my concern
after he throws the dogs onto the fire.
The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.
When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep
until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially
which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets
and tails like peacocks, covered in tar
weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows
at the rim of the marsh. But once
I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals
my first lament. So now I guard
my inhumanity like the jackal
who appears behind the army base at dusk,
come there for scraps with his head lowered
in a posture that looks like appeasement
though it is not.
Again, the Body
I have become what I have always been and it has taken a lifetime, all of my own life, to reach this point where it is as if I know finally that I am alive and that I am here, right now.
TOBIAS SCHNEEBAUM, Keep the River on Your Right
When you spend many hours alone in a room
you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself—
this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal
but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us
do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,
from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bit
a thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum,
who walked four days into the jungle
and stayed for the kindness of the tribe—
who would have thought that cannibals would be so tender?
This could be any life: the vegetation is thick
and when there is an opening, you follow
down its tunnel until one night you find yourself
walking as on any night, though of a sudden your beloved
friends are using their stone blades
to split the skulls of other men. Gore everywhere,
though the chunk I ate was bland;
it was only when I chewed too far and bled
that the taste turned satisfyingly salty.
How difficult to be in a body,
how easy to be repelled by it,
eating one-sixth of the human heart.
Afterward, the hunters rested
their heads on one another’s thighs
while the moon shined on the river
for the time it took to cross the narrow sky
making its gash through the trees…
My Father Kept the TV On
while the books lay open, scattered facedown
like turtles sunning, the jackets hunched, with a little
hump in the hunch from the trough of the spine,
bearing a white sticker with the typewriter’s Courier
font rendition of the decimal system
under the wrapper, hazy like fog
taped to the book, the tape’s yellow orange-almost
(depending on how old) reinforced with threads.
Meanwhile his eyes drifted back and forth
back and forth until the book slid to the floor.
The flag then. Then snow. Or the corporate logo
of the eye— all night the night would watch him,
plural, them. Just ask my friend whose father
was a drunk, a highball glass on the nightstand and a swizzle
stick to mark his place. Still, on Thursday nights
he stumbled down to the reading room
to leaf through the new arrivals.
Oh green republic where the pilgrims came to land!
If I’m going to choose my nostalgia it is a no-brainer
that I’m going to side with books, with the days
before the lithium-ion battery, but after
Philip Roth and John le Carré were born, books not too
highbrow or too low, but sometimes thick
and overdue. Books the fathers read to escape us
who were the shackles that the plodding days
latched on to them who’d started out their lives with war, so this
was perfect, courting danger in their underwear,
feeling the breast of the vixen stiffen,
slipping their hands into the thief’s black glove.
After the Names Are Gone, the Damage Will Remain
Though the twins were not identical, they both had skin
so thin & clear I could see their veins’ squiggling underneath.
One with red hair, one with white
& the veins made their combined colors patriotic
if a little terrifying
in the auditorium where we’d assembled,
their tears falling in a formal style of grief
reserved for civic purposes, I learned this
from mothers who’d stood by the mailbox, weeping
as we filed by them in the school bus
six years before, when bullets ruined the famous head
of the famous handsome man. Now
the girls’ red eye-rims similarly deliquesced,
their shrill notes ascending:
President Eisenhower! Has! Died!
news that made me scratch an old mosquito bite
& scrutinize the upturned faces of my shoes—
even in my girlish nerdfog
I must have understood that some will not withstand posterity,
that all the bodies on the beach at Normandy
still lead to the muse’s turning her cool marble shoulder.
Permissible to insert here the twins’ white lashes
& the curve of their hot foreheads. But
how tentatively one must ask the nouns & verbs
to step apart for Eisenhower, though he ransacked
more than his share of cities. Like the moon
his pale head hovers, yet he does not go around
like some transhistorical Fuller Brush man
sticking his foot in the door
the pale girl of my ode slams shut.
To the Field of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall
Half costume jewel, half parasite, you stood
swaying to the music of cash registers in the distance
while a helicopter chewed the linings
of the clouds above the clear-cuts.
And I forgave the pollen count
while cabbage moths teased up my hair
before your flowers fell apart when they
turned into seeds. How resigned you were
to your oblivion, unlistening to the cumuli