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

by, the black slide into nothing
    (well, someone ought to speak for it).

    Or it can come in white— not so much the swirling snow
    as the fallen stuff that makes the mind continuous
    with the meadow that it sees.

Auntie Roach

    Courage is no good:
    It means not scaring others.
    PHILIP LARKIN

    One day George Washington rides around Mount Vernon
    for five hours on his horse, the next
    he’s making his auspicious exodus
    on the spectrum of possible deaths.
    Rasputin was fed cyanide in little cakes
    but did not slough his living husk,
    and so Prince Felix sang to him, then mesmerized him
    with a gaudy cross. And though he dropped when he was shot
    he popped back up and ran outside: it was
    Purishkevich who fired three times in the courtyard—
    but even with his body bound
    in the frozen Neva, one arm worked

    its way free. Now, he must have howled
    while his giblets leaked, though the cold
    is reputed to be kind. Sliding his end
    toward a numeral less horrible; it falls
    say as a six on a scale of zero to ten?
    Shakespeare went out drinking, caught a fever,
    ding! Odds are we’ll be addled—
    what kind of number can be put on that?
    One with endless decimals,
    unless you luck into some kind woman,
    maker of the minimum wage, black or brown and brave enough
    to face your final wreck? My friends horde pills

    for their bad news, but I wonder if it’s cowardly
    to be unequal to the future. Someone should write a book
    for nursery school, with crucial facts like: how,
    as the sun drops, shadows lengthen, including a sharp
    or blurry one that is your own. And you scuttle from it
    like a cockroach fleeing light— an anti-roach,
    running from the dark. See my feelers, long and feathery:
    I am more than well prepared.
    Ulysses Grant lay in misery for half a year,
    after eating a peach that pained his tongue.
    Versus Ivan the Terrible, last heard singing in the bath,
    who fainted dead while setting up the chessboard.

Another Treatise on Beauty

    The boyish foreign tyrant wears faun-colored desert boots
    hooked boyishly around the rungs of his chair

    on this talk show where he speaks with the voice of a woman
    who interprets from the ether. He’s smiling

    like the naughty boy in school who picked his teeth
    with a stiletto: mister, you may be despicable

    but my boyfriend wore those same boots once,
    and I loved him in them, despite the stolen tape deck

    in his car. How small a blemish does your narco-trafficking
    shrink to, what with that comely stubble on your cheeks,

    your brocade cap and wool cape tossed
    across your shoulder like a cavalier’s? Perhaps we need

    to recalibrate the scale or set your crimes
    in one pan of the balance, so when we set your beauty

    in the other it will rise, as beauty does, instead of clunking down.
    As beauty rises, even when it goes unseen. See

    how many of the famous modern paintings
    were made by men who have such vigor in old age?

    And when I flip open the back covers of their books,
    the famous lady poets all have shiny hair.

Bad French Movie

    Isabelle Huppert in a peep show booth
    with the wilted bloom of a used Kleenex,
    and not her Kleenex,
une mouchoir étrange
—
    this is not a promising get-go.

    But can’t my hopes be phototropic
    as I sit in the front row with my head cocked back
    like a newly fractured dicotyledonous bean
    uncurling on its sprout?

    The popcorn here is not just bad—
    for years the hopper has accrued its crud
    so that sometimes you crunch down on what
    tastes like a greasy tractor bolt

    and are transported to a former Soviet republic
    instead of some seedy part of Paris.
    You have to swipe the burned nib off your lips
    before scuffing it back, toward the lovers who’ve come

    to make out in this habitat, upholstered
    in the velvet mode of tongues. And when
    I turn to see if they’ve noticed
    their ankles’ being pinged by my scorched old maids

    all the hardware bolted in their faces
    glints like