Synopsis
Book by Perillo Lucia
Extrait
Chapter 1
I
Christ died for us, Paul taught? How strange
A god should think a man’s requirements so
Excessive.
—Vassar Miller
To My Big Nose
Hard to believe there were actual years
when I planned to have you cut from my face—
hard to imagine what the world would have looked like
if not seen through your pink shadow.
You who are built from random parts
like a mythical creature—a gryphon or sphinx—
with the cartilage ball attached to your tip
and the plaque where the bone flares at the bridge
like a snake who has swallowed a small coin.
Seabird beak or tanker prow
with Modigliani nostrils, like those strolled out
from the dank studio and its close air,
with a swish-swish whisper from the model’s silk robe
as it parts and then falls shut again.
Then you’re out on the sidewalk of Montparnasse
with its fumes of tulips and clotted cream
and clotted lungs and cigars and sewers—
even fumes from the lobster who walks on a leash.
And did his owner march slowly
or drag his swimmerets briskly along
through the one man’s Parisian dogturd that is
the other man’s cutting-edge conceptual art?
So long twentieth century, my Pygmalion.
So long rhinoplasty and the tummy tuck.
Let the vowels squeak through my sinuses
like wet sheets hauled on a laundry line’s rusty wheels.
Oh I am not so dumb as people have made me out,
what with your detours when I speak,
and you are not so cruel, though you frightened men off
all those years when I thought I was running the show,
pale ghost who has led me like a knife
continually slicing the future stepped into,
oh rudder/wing flap/daggerboard, my whole life
turning me this way and that.
Languedoc
Southern France, the troubadour age:
all these men running around in frilly sleeves.
Each is looking for a woman he could write a song about—
or the moonlight a woman, the red wine a woman,
there is even a woman called the Albigensian Crusade.
It’s the tail end of the Dark Age
but if we wait a little longer it’ll be the Renaissance
and the forms of the songs will be named and writ down;
wait: here comes the villanelle, whistling along the pike,
repeating the same words over and over
until I’m afraid my patience with your serenade
runs out: time’s up. Long ago
I might have been attracted by your tights and pantaloons,
but now they just look silly, ditto for your instrument
that looks like a gourd with strings attached
(the problem is always the strings attached).
Langue d’oc, meaning the language of yes, as in
“Do you love me?” Oc. “Even when compared
to her who sports the nipple ring?” Oc oc.
“Will we age gracefully and die appealing deaths?”
Oc oc oc oc.
So much affirmation ends up sounding like
a murder of crows passing overhead
and it is easy to be afraid of crows—
though sometimes you have to start flapping your arms
and follow them. And fly to somewhere the signs say:
Yes Trespassing, Yes Smoking,
Yes Alcohol Allowed on Premises, Yes Shirt Yes Shoes
Yes Service Yes. Yes Loitering
here by this rocky coast whose waves are small
and will not break your neck; this ain’t no ocean, baby,
this is just the sea. Yes Swimming
Yes Bicycles Yes to Nude Sunbathing All Around,
Yes to Herniated Bathing-cappèd Veterans of World War One
and Yes to Leathery Old Lady Joggers.
Yes to their sun visors and varicose veins in back of their knees,
I guess James Joyce did get here first—
sometimes the Europeans seem much more advanced.
But you can’t go through life regretting what you are,
yes, I’m talking to you in the baseball cap,
I’m singing this country-western song that goes: Yeah!
Oc!Yes!Oui!We!—will dive—right—in.
Christmas at Forty
Everyone needs a bosom for a pillow
Lying on the couch, staring up at the tree,
listening to that Indian raga trip-hop music
that one minute sounds like panpipes from Kashmir
and the next like a knife stuck into the speakers;
whammo! it hits: how unexpected life is.
One minute you’re a punk driving around
in Eddie Butterford’s blue Dodge, hashing
out the script for whatever happens next,
something that with any luck’ll be
hallucinogenic . . . but then somehow you end up
with a whole mortgageful of ornaments in the attic
and even a green metal stand to triangulate the trunk.
And all you remember coming in between is a whole
lot of dithering about what to play
on the tape deck next—what was all the worry?
Now, in the pantry, you’ve got bottles
of liqueurs made by obscure sects of Italian monks;
in the bathroom all the vials bequeathed by your beloved
dying friends, who said, Here, take the Demerol
for a rainy day; take the Darvocet, you never know
when you might need it. Back in Eddie’s car
nobody thought death would be the dealer
who someday would drop his manna on us
& if anyone had told me about these snowmen
made from crochet pom-pom balls
I would have said, What are you, nuts?
Sometimes in those days I panhandled
just to feel what it felt like to say, Can I have
a quarter, please? and then to cower in the brimstone
I thought for sure would rain down on my head.
But people just gave me more money than I asked for
and told me to go on home, so okay:
now I’m home. Where I’ve got not just the snowmen
and the tree stand, but also a glass angel for the top—
take that, all you sanctimonious quarter-givers.
No rainy days yet, but in just a minute
I’ll take off my clothes and stomp around
with that strange guy who lives here.
After we drink to the health of the baby Jesus
with that very old brandy made from secret herbs.
Fizz Ed
Hard to pinpoint when the body starts turning.
One minute we’re Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr
heavy-petting in the surf, but then the surf pulls out
sizzling like grease and suddenly we find
ourselves no longer shrouded
by the Pacific Ocean’s glamorous foam.
Instead, I think of seals, all snout and lobe and whisker.
All gluey effluence and ectomorphic musk.
So life heavily petted was not the real goods,
it was just a decoy good—that diverted us
for a season. Before the siege of flatulence
and strange-colored moles that multiply on the neck.
And where was the warning—about how the nose
would come to claim more real estate on the head?
How the bristles multiply in all its openings:
the nostrils’ black forest, the white shrub in each ear?
No matter now, the birds and bees,
but I could have used a little heads-up about the eyebrows
(their mysterious length, their magisterial spread—)
if only to prepare me for this ancient Eastern European poet
speaking through the curved clear wall of my TV.
When his brow dips, the gray curls brush his cheeks
and I’m thinking, Man oh man—
pretty soon this guy is going to take wing.
The Crows Start Demanding Royalties
Of all the birds, they are the ones
who mind their being armless most:
witness how, when they walk, their heads jerk
back and forth like rifle bolts.
How they heave their shoulders into each stride
as if they hoped that by some chance
new bones there would come popping out
with a boxing glove on the end of each.
Little Elvises, the hairdo slicked
with too much grease, they convene on my lawn
to strategize for their class-action suit.
Flight they would trade in a New York minute
for a black muscle car and a fist on the shift
at any stale green light. But here in my yard
by the Jack-in-the-Box Dumpster
they can only fossick in the grass for remnants
of the world’s stale buns. And this
despite all the crow poems that have been written
because men like to see themselves as crows
(the head-jerk performed in the rearview mirror,
the dark brow commanding the rainy weather).
So I think I know how they must feel:
ripped off, shook down, taken to the cleaners.
What they’d like to do now is smash a phone against a wall.
But they can’t, so each one flies to a bare branch and screams.
On the Destruction of the Mir
Every night space junk falls from the sky—
usually a titanium fuel tank. Usually falling
into the ocean, or into nowhere in particular
because ours is a planet of great vacancies,
no matter how much fog would be required
in downtown Tokyo. In the Skylab days
you’d see people on the streets wearing iron
helmets, like centurions. But nowadays
we go bareheaded, as if to say to the heavens:
Wake me when I am someone else.
Like the man whose car made fast acquaintance
with what Yeats would have called the bole of a tree.
And who now believes he has written
many of the latest hits, which he will sing
for you while he splits a cord of wood:
like a virgin—whap!—like a virgin—whap!—
until he’s got enough fuel for the winter
and a million dollars ...
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