Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones - Lucia Perillo

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      to bar a terror needing no window for entry:

      it resides within. And where do we turn for protection

      from our selves? My mother, for example, recommends marriage—

      to a physician or some other wealthy healer. Of course

      it’s him, leering from his station behind her shoulder,

      who’s making her say such things: the witch doctor,

      headhunter, the corporate shaman, his scalpel

      drawn & ready, my scalp his ticket out.

      Gambelli’s waitresses sometimes got down on their knees

      searching for coins dropped into the carpet—

      hair coiled and stiff, lips coated in that hennaed shade of red,

      the banner-color for lives spent in the wake of husbands

      dying without pensions, their bodies used in ceaseless

      marching toward the kitchen’s mouth, firm legs

      migrating slowly ankleward. From that doorway,

      Frankie Gambelli would sic a booze-eye on them,

      his arms flapping in an earthbound pantomime of that

      other Frank: The Swooned-Over. “You old cunts,”

      he’d mutter. “Why do I put up with you old cunts?”—

      never managing to purge his voice’s tenor note

      of longing. At me—the summer girl—he’d only stare

      from between his collapsing red lids, eyes that were empty.

      Once I got stiffed on a check when a man jerked

      out of his seat, craned around, then bolted

      from those subterranean women, sweaty and crippled

      in the knees. Though I chased him up the stairs to the street,

      the light outside was blinding and I lost the bastard

      to that whiteness, and I betrayed myself with tears.

      But coming back downstairs my eyes dried on another vision:

      I saw that the dusk trapped by the restaurant’s plastic greenery

      was really some residual light of that brilliance happening

      above us on the street. Then for a moment the waitresses

      hung frozen in midstride—cork trays outstretched—

      like wide-armed, reeling dancers, the whole

      some humming and benevolent machine that knew no past, no future—

      only balanced glasses, and the good coin in the pocket.

      Sinatra was singing “Jealous Lover.” All of us were young.

      I quit med school when I found out the stiff they gave me

      had book 9 of Paradise Lost and the lyrics

      to “Louie Louie” tattooed on her thighs.

      That morning as the wind was mowing

      little ladies on a street below, I touched a Bunsen burner

      to 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.

      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.

       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

      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,

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