Читать книгу Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones - Lucia Perillo - Страница 13

Skin

Back then it seemed that wherever a girl took off her clothes

the police would find her—

in the backs of cars or beside the dark night ponds, opening

like a green leaf across

some boy’s knees, the skin so taut beneath the moon

it was almost too terrible,

too beautiful to look at, a tinderbox, though she did not know.

But the men who came

beating the night rushes with their flashlights and thighs —

they knew. About Helen,

about how a body could cause the fall of Troy and the death

of a perfectly good king.

So they read the boy his rights and shoved him spread-legged

against the car

while the girl hopped barefoot on the asphalt, cloaked

in a wool rescue blanket.

Or sometimes girls fled so their fathers wouldn’t hit them,

their legs flashing as they ran.

And the boys were handcuffed just until their wrists had welts

and let off half a block from home.

God for how many years did I believe there were truly laws

against such things,

laws of adulthood: no yelling out of cars in traffic tunnels,

no walking without shoes,

no singing any foolish songs in public places. Or else

they could lock you in jail

or condemn your self and soul by telling both your lower-

and uppercase Catholic fathers.

And out of all these crimes, unveiling the body was of course

the worst, as though something

about the skin’s phosphorescence, its surface as velvet

as a deer’s new horn,

could drive not only men but civilization mad, could lead us

to unspeakable cruelties.

There were elders who from experience understood these things

much better than we.

And it’s true: remembering I had that kind of skin does drive me

half-crazy with loss.

Skin like the spathe of a broad white lily

on the first morning it unfurls.