Читать книгу Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones - Lucia Perillo - Страница 27

Beige Trash

Who is to blame for there being no tractors

churning the soil into veils

to drape over the telling

where and how I grew, in a suburb

with no men that I could in good conscience adorn

with prosthetic limbs or even crushed straw hats?

Kudzu was something we shouted

jujitsuing air like the Green Hornet’s sidekick

whose name still needed some time to ferment

in those years separating the yellow peril

from kung-fu mania, before BRUCE LEE

floated up to the marquee lights.

Like the stripers you could not eat

floating on top of the poisonous river,

to whose bank we never carried our burdens

and let them weep down into Jersey.

Because surely these words would have profited

from at least one silo lording over,

with some earthmoving equipment

parked nearby in a nest of wire

belonging to some good old boy named…

what? Leldon? Lemuel? But sorry:

in no barn did the whiskey bottles lie

like Confederate casualties at Appomattox —

no tent revivals, no cousins with red hair

and freckled hands, no words as exotic as po’boy

or chifforobe or muffuletta. Which meant

we had no means to wrangle Beauty

into the cathedrals of our mouths,

though on occasion an ordinary cow

could make the car’s eight-chambered heart

stop dead beside a pasture, where none of us

dared get out for fear of stampedes or hay fever

or maybe even fangs hidden behind the lips.

Call us ignorant: everything we knew poured out

those two-at-a-time black-and-white TVS —

one for picture, one for sound — & antlered

with coat hangers that gave even Hawaii Five-O

the speckling of constant winter. The snow

fell like the fur of our fat white dog

for whom my mother cooked lamb chops every night

in an attempt to cure its baldness,

while we dug our fingers in the chopmeat

before she slapped it into patties.

Then Star Trek came on. Then for an hour

the men faded in and out of light.

And there is nothing about this past

it does any service to the language to recall:

Art was what the fire department sold tickets to,

raising money for the hook and ladder.

It took place inside the school auditorium,

where an old Italian couple hid

by donning black and standing

just outside the purple spotlight.

Then music surged that was vaguely familiar

though we’d fail to lure its elaborate name

in from the borders of what we knew,

while the marionette-swan bobbled to its feet

as if newly born. I can say it now:

Tchaikovsky. Of course, the whole time

they worked the sticks and strings,

the puppeteers stood right out in the open.

Yet how silently they moved, how easy

a thing they were to pretend we couldn’t see.