Peter Pereira

He will not light long enough for the interpreter to gather the tatters of his speech. But the longer we listen the calmer he becomes. He shows me the place where his daughter has rubbed with a coin, violaceous streaks raising a skeletal pattern on his chest. He thinks he’s been hit by the wind. He’s worried it will become pneumonia.

simmers on the kitchen stove. All afternoon dense kernels surrender to the fertile juices, their tender bellies swelling with delight. In the yard we plant rhubarb, cauliflower, and artichokes, cupping wet earth over tubers, our labor the germ of later sustenance and renewal. Across the field the sound of a baby crying as we carry in the last carrots, whorls of butter lettuce, a basket of red potatoes. I want to remember us this way— late September sun streaming through the window, bread loaves and golden bunches of grapes on the table, spoonfuls of hot soup rising to our lips, filling us with what endures.

"F. . . the oven is an F" Samantha Foggle, age 3 Oh, to hear the world with such clarity. Such surety. To know the note of your breakfast chat is B-flat minor. That the ’57 Chevy stalled outside the garage is a D. To recognize the Apricot kitchen paint for what it is: F-sharp. To understand the way you feel for him is G, definitely a G. And as you watch him descend the scale of the front steps to his car for work, the house quiets to an A. The arpeggio of last night’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favor still ringing in your ears.

Before devising, your chicken you do not have to count. As for the penny which is rescued it is the penny which is obtained. The girl and the spice has become entirely from the splendid sugar. The boy has consisted of the tail of the slug and the snail and the puppy. As for the place of the woman there is a house. One basket your egg everything does not have to be made. The idiot hurries being about you fear because the angel steps on. Your cake cannot do possessing and is eaten thing. There is no wastefulness, unless so is, we want. The safe which is better than regrettable. Living, you have lived, permit.

With a boil the size of an egg protruding from her right hip, she knows what I must do, and to stall me has locked herself inside the bathroom, bargaining for a way out. But it’s too late: I’ve seen the oozing wounds stopped up with bits of toilet paper and tape, the scarified pockets that crater the surface of her arms, buttocks, thighs. A mean fix torched her last vein years ago, and she’s been banging the dope ever since, puncturing her body like a juju doll. She wants to kick, but not now. I’m not gonna lie to you, she says in a velvet voice. I already know what she’s after: something stronger than local, a few Percocet, a shot of Demerol before she’ll let me begin. All I can tell you is, when the abscess finally drains the odor is so foul it’s evil. And I’m not sure, driving home later that night, still smelling the pallid citrus, whether it’s merely hallucination, the way her memory inhabits me; or if being in that same room, inhaling that same air, made some of her part of me. And whose veins are these, beginning to twitch?

Gift of a friend, the stone Buddha sits zazen, prayer beads clutched in his chubby fingers. Through snow, icy rain, the riot of spring flowers, he gazes forward to the city in the distance—always the same bountiful smile upon his portly face. Why don’t I share his one-minded happiness? The pear blossom, the crimson-petaled magnolia, filling me instead with a mixture of nostalgia and yearning.  He’s laughing at me, isn’t he? The seasons wheeling despite my photographs and notes, my desire to make them pause. Is that the lesson?  That stasis, this holding on, is not life?  Now I’m smiling, too—the late cherry, its soft pink blossoms already beginning to scatter; the trillium, its three-petaled white flowers exquisitely tinged with purple as they fall.

this is just to say I saw the icebox and wheels rumbling through the figure 5 I saw the white chickens in the dark city glazed with rain I saw the figure 5 in the white chickens the plums that were in gold on a red wheel barrow the plums that you were probably saving among the rain water I have eaten the dark city so sweet the plums that were so sweet this is just to say I have eaten the figure 5 in the plums that so much depends that were in gold on a red firetruck

If you believe in the magic of language, then Elvis really Lives and Princess Diana foretold I end as car spin. If you believe the letters themselves contain a power within them, then you understand what makes outside tedious, how desperation becomes a rope ends it. The circular logic that allows senator to become treason, and treason to become atoners. That eleven plus two is twelve plus one, and an admirer is also married. That if you could just rearrange things the right way you’d find your true life, the right path, the answer to your questions: you’d understand how the Titanic turns into that ice tin, and debit card becomes bad credit. How listen is the same as silent, and not one letter separates stained from sainted.

You call me to the bath, where by evening light before bed I rub the ointment into your maculate back. I place my hand between the wings of your scapulae, where you cannot reach, cannot see—the arc of your life revealed in its pattern of coffee-colored spots—and hover there awhile, remembering how we watched the lover read the manuscript painted on the skin of his beloved; how he pressed the words to his chest and face—and cried out. The arteries in my palm open, their warmth rising between us as I massage you, neither sexual nor umbilical, this connection—you trusting your back to me, and me with no deceit. Only salve, only unguent. Only balm.