Free On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths by Lucia Perillo Page A

step over a human bone while following a deer-path
    you want to step over another, unless you are not ruled
    by curiosity as I was ruled. Or had already seen a skull
    mossy in its entirety, with three holes (eye sockets
    + the nose) + the palate on the duff.
    Into which the green teeth bit, the moss
    covering it all like luminescent car upholstery,
    what do you do if you are just a dumb American,
    I can usually figure out how to behave, but require years
    to come to my conclusions. Now
    the fact the reparations have come due
    is being made clear by the photo of the skull
    I took when I was young and dumb, this anti-
    luck charm emanating green recriminations,
    though I notice that I do not take it from the wall.

I Could Name Some Names

    of those who have drifted through thus far of their allotted
    fifty or seventy or ninety years on Earth
    with no disasters happening,
    whatever had to be given up was given up—
    the food at the rehab facility was better than you would expect
    and the children turned out more or less okay;
    sure there were some shaky years
    but no one’s living in the basement anymore
    with a divot in his head, that’s where the shrapnel landed/or
    don’t look at her stump. It is easy
    to feel possessed of a soul that’s better schooled
    than the fluffy cloud inside of people who have never known suchlike
    events by which our darlings
    are unfavorably remade. And the self
    is the darling’s darling
    (I = darling 2 ). Every day
    I meditate against my envy
    aimed at those who drift inside the bubble of no-trouble,
    â€” what is the percentage? 20% of us? 8%? zero?
    Maybe the ex-president with his nubile daughters,
    vigorous old parents, and clean colonoscopy. Grrrr.
    Remember to breathe.
Breathe in suffering,
    breathe out blessings
say the ancient dharma texts.
    Still I beg to file this one complaint
    that some are mountain-biking through the scrublands
    while she is here at Ralph’s Thriftway,
    running her thumb over a peach’s bruise,
    her leg a steel rod
    in a miniskirt, to make sure I see.

Cold Snap, November

    That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.
    JOHN BERGER ,
The Sense of Sight

    In 2006, in Ohio, Joseph Clark raised his head in the middle of his execution to say, “It’s not working.”

    The salmon corpses clog the creek without sufficient room to spin:
    see, even the fish want to kill themselves this time of year
    the therapist jokes. Her remedy
    is to record three gratitudes a day—
    so let the fish count for one, make two the glaucous gulls
    who pluck the eyes before they fill
    with the cloudy juice of vanishing.

    But don’t these monuments to
there
-ness
    feel a little ostentatious? Not just the gratitudes,
    but also what they used to call a hardware store
    where you hike for hours underneath the ether
    between the ceiling and the dropped-down lighting tubes,
    muttering
I need a lock-washer for my lawnmower shroud
—
    huh? You know
    you should feel like Walt Whitman, celebrating
    everything, but instead you feel like Pope Julius II
    commanding Michelangelo to carve forty statues for his tomb.

    When even one giant marble Moses feels like a bit too much.
    This year made it almost to December without a frost to deflate the dahlias
    and though I stared for hours at the psychedelia of their petals,
    trying to coax them to apply their shock-paddles to my heart,
    it wasn’t working. Until one morning when
    I found them black and staggering in their pails,
    charred marionettes, twist-tied to their stakes, I apologize
    for being less turned-on by the thing than by its going.
    Not the sunset
    but afterward when we stand dusted with the sunset’s silt,

    and not the surgical theater, even with its handsome anesthesiologist
    in blue dustcap and booties— no,

    his
after
’s what I’m buzzed