Читать книгу Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones - Lucia Perillo - Страница 28

Foley

It is Harrison Ford who just saved the world,

but when he walks down a dirt road toward the ultralarge sun

what sound like his boots are really bricks being drudged

through a boxful of coffee beans. And the mare you’ve seen

clopping along those nineteenth-century cobbles —

she’s a coconut struck by a ball-peen hammer.

And the three girls riding in the hansom,

where the jouncing rustles their silk-and-bone:

that’s a toothbrush moving across birchbark.

Even the moment when one kickboxer’s perfect body

makes contact with the other kickboxer’s perfect body

has nothing to do with kickboxing, or bodies,

but the concrete colliding with the abstract of perfection,

which molts into a leather belt spanking a side of beef.

This is the problem with movies:

go to enough of them and pretty soon the world

starts sounding wrongly synced against itself: e.g.,

last night when I heard a noise below my bedroom window

that sounded like the yowl a cat would make

if its tongue were being yanked backward out its ass.

Pain, I thought. Help, I thought,

so at two a.m. I went outside with a flashlight

and found a she-cat corkscrewed to a tom,

both of them humped and quivering where the beam flattened

against the grass whose damp was already wicking

through my slippers. Aaah… love, I thought,

or some distantly cousined feline analogue of love,

or the feline analogue of the way love came out of the radio

in certain sixties pop songs that had the singer keening

antonyms: how can something so right feel so wrong,

so good hurt so bad… you know what I’m talking about.

And don’t you think it’s peculiar:

in the first half of the sixties they made the black girl-groups

sing with white accents and in the second half of the sixties

they made the white girl-groups sing with black accents,

which proves that what you hear is always

some strange alchemy of what somebody thinks you’ll pay for

and what you expect. Love in particular

it seems to me we’ve never properly nailed down

so we’ll know it when we hear it coming, the way

screaming “Fire!” means something to the world.

I remember this guy who made noises against my neck

that sounded like when after much tugging on a jar lid

you stick a can opener under its lip—that little tsuck.

At first I thought this must be

one of love’s least common dialects, though later

when I found the blue spots all over I realized

it was malicious mischief, it was vandalism, it was damage.

Everybody has a story about the chorus of these,

love’s faulty hermeneutics: the muffler in retreat

mistaken for the motor coming, the declaration

of loathing construed as the minor reproach;

how “Babe, can I borrow five hundred bucks?”

gets dubbed over “Goodbye, chump”—of course,

of course, and you slap your head but it sounds funny,

not enough sizzle, not enough snap. If only

Berlitz had cracked the translations or we had conventions

like the international code of semaphores;

if only some equivalent of the Captain Midnight decoder ring

had been muscled across the border. As it has

for my friend who does phone sex

because it’s a job that lets her keep at her typewriter all day,

tapping out poems. Somehow she can work

both sides of her brain simultaneously, the poem

being what’s really going on and the sex being what sounds

like what’s going on; the only time she stops typing

is when she pinches her cheek away from her gums,

which is supposed to sound like oral sex

though she says it’s less that it really sounds like oral sex

than that these men have established a pact, a convention

that permits them to believe it sounds like oral sex.

When they know

it’s a woman pinching her cheek and not a blow job,

it’s a telephone call and not a blow job,

it’s a light beam whistling down a fiber, for god’s sake,

and not a blow job. Most days I’m amazed

we’re not all schizophrenics, hearing voices

that have been edited out of what calls to us

from across the fourth wall. I’ve heard

that in To Have and Have Not Lauren Bacall’s singing

comes from the throat of a man; also that Bart Simpson is really

a middle-aged woman; and last week not once but twice

I heard different women wailing

in public parking lots, the full throttle

of unrestrained grief, and both times I looked straight at them

and pretended nothing unusual was going on,

as though what I was hearing were only the sound of air

shrieking through the spoiler on someone’s Camaro.

That’s also part of the pact my friend’s talking about,

not to offer condolence, not to take note.

You don’t tell the men they’re sorry creatures,

you don’t ask the women what went wrong.

If you’re being mugged or raped or even killed

you have to scream “Fire!” instead of “Help!”

to get someone to help you. Though soon, if not already,

all the helpers will have caught on

and then you’ll have to start screaming something else,

like that you’ve spotted Bacall or Harrison Ford on the street,

Bart Simpson even—no wait a minute, he’s not real,

though I remember a time when even the president talked about him

as if he were human. It’s not the sleaziness

of phone sex I bristle at, but rather the way it assists

the world in becoming imprecise