Lucia Perillo

For Marybelle Her daughter wrote back to say my friend had died (my friend to whom I wrote a letter maybe twice a year). From time to time I'd pictured her amid strange foliage (and in a Mongol yurt, for she was fond of travel). Why not a flock of something darkening the sky, so we would know (ah, so-and-so is gone!)? For a woman from the city, this might perhaps be pigeons (blacking out the sun). Or else a human messenger, as once when she was fabric shopping (bolt of green silk furled across her body) Garbo passed, and nodded. At Macy's years ago (when I was not a creature in her world). Of course she bought the cloth, but never sewed the dress ("a massive stroke, and I take comfort in the fact she felt no pain.") Logic says we should make omens of our Garbos and our birds (but which one bears the message? which one just the mess?) From the kayak, I've seen pigeons nesting underneath the pier (a dim ammoniated stink) where one flew into my face. I read this as a sign (that rancid smash of feathers) but couldn't fathom what it meant, trapped in the lag-time (of an oracle's translation). Foolish mind, wanting to obliterate the lag and why— (let memory wait to catch up to its sorrow).

Somebody left this white T-shirt like a hangman’s hood on the new parking meter— the magic marks upon its back say:I QUIT METH 4-EVER. A declaration to the sky, whose angels all wear seagull wings swooping over this street with its torn scratch tickets and Big Gulp cups dropped by the curb. Extra large, it has been customized with a pocketknife or a canine tooth to rough the armholes where my boobs wobble out as I roam these rooms lit by twilight’s bulb, feeling half like Bette Davis in a wheelchair and half like that Hell’s Angels kingpin with the tracheotomy. Dear reader, do you know that guy? I didn’t think so. If only we could all watch the same TV. But no doubt you have seen the gulls flying, and also the sinister bulked-up crows carrying white clouds of hotdog buns in their beaks: you can promise them you’ll straighten up, but they are such big cynics. I should have told you My lotto #’s 2-11-19-23-36 is what’s written in front, beside the silk screen for Listerine Cool Mint PocketPaks™— which means you can’t hijack my name; no, you have to go find your own, like a Hopi brave. You might have to sit in a sweat lodge until you pass out or eat a weird vine and it will not be pleasant. Your pulse goes staccato like a Teletype machine— then blam you’ll be transformed into your post-larval being. Maybe swallowtail, maybe moth: trust me, I know because once I was a baby blue convertible but now I’m this black hot rod painted with flames.

I couldn't have waited. By the time you return it would have rotted on the vine. So I cut the first tomato into eighths, salted the pieces in the dusk and found the flesh not mealy (like last year's) or bitter, even when I swallowed the green crown of the stem that made my throat feel dusty and warm. Pah. I could have gagged on the sweetness. The miser accused by her red sums. Better had I eaten the dirt itself on this the first night in my life when I have not been too busy for my loneliness— at last, it comes.

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.

1. “Naked woman surrounded by police”: that’s one way to start the poem. But would she mean anything devoid of her context, in this case a lushly late-August deciduous forest, some maple, mostly oak? She carries no prop—for example, no bike chain, which the cops could be sawing from the tree trunk that she’s wedded to her body. But let’s start with her pure, and untranslated, as the famous cartoon of the door is a mystery until we post the word LADIES at a point that would be four feet up from the ground if this door were not drawn two inches tall—it’s us, you see, who make believe it corresponds to a “true-life” human door. Does it help if I say the naked woman is “really” my true- life friend, she of the tangled dago surname we don’t need to get into here? And if I say next that she has been swimming—in Lake Tiorati— 2. you can see how straightaway the tangling subdivides into (a) where the hell is Lake Tiorati? and (b) why naked?—to the last let me answer that it’s 1978 and she is twenty; at college she’s been reading Simone de Beauvoir and learning words like patriarchy and oppression. And these have been Mixmastered into her thinking even about swimsuits—i.e., that not to wear one is to rip the sign off the door and stomp it underfoot. When she lies on a rock the last thing she expects is the tingling she feels now against her wrist, from a guy peeing brazenly at her perimeter. This is an impasse whose bud she thought she had nipped by aggravating her muscles into interlaced mounds so her body resembles a relief map of the Appalachians. In whose northernmost range this story unfolds & hence the much-delayed answer to item (a), above. 3. “Naked woman dadadadada police”: not a story but words at the end of a chain whose first link is her realizing that the Puerto Rican kids across the lake splashing and whooping are not having fun— though this is the sign that she’d stuck on their door. No, there’s another word for the kid slapping his palms on the water: Drowning. Even the urinater abruptly stops his stream and stumbles back from her, ashamed. And because she’s the one with the lifeguard build and because all the guys are much too drunk, without even thinking she finds herself paddling toward the spot these kids are now screaming Julio! at, where she draws a mental X upon the water. Of course, it is a fantasy, the correspondence that would make a drawing equal life, and so you understand how amazing it is, when she dives to the bottom and her hand happens on the child. 4. Perhaps what she expected was for the men on shore to pay her no mind, as in Manet’s Déjeuner . . . : the naked woman sits among them, yet she is a ghost. But the kids keep yelling Julio! even after she’s hauled the wet one out, the one she points to:Julio okay. No, they shriek, Julio otro! words she knows just enough Spanish to know mean there’s another Julio in the lake. Whom she cannot save despite her next round of diving, which lasts until the cops come hiking down the trail in their cop shoes. Then she comes ashore and stands shivering among them, telling the story calmly enough until she ends it with: for Christ’s sake can’t anyone give her a T-shirt? They’re staring as if somehow she’s what’s to blame, seeing a naked woman, not the miracle. Which is, of course, the living boy, that with these words —Julio otro!— we manage to make sense to anyone at all.