Luck Is Luck: Poems Hardcover - 2005

Excerpt

Chapter 1

I

Christ died for us, Paul taught? How strange

A god should think a man’s requirements so

Excessive.

—Vassar Miller


To My Big Nose


Hard to believe there were actual years

when I planned to have you cut from my face—

hard to imagine what the world would have looked like

if not seen through your pink shadow.

You who are built from random parts

like a mythical creature—a gryphon or sphinx—

with the cartilage ball attached to your tip

and the plaque where the bone flares at the bridge

like a snake who has swallowed a small coin.

Seabird beak or tanker prow

with Modigliani nostrils, like those strolled out

from the dank studio and its close air,

with a swish-swish whisper from the model’s silk robe

as it parts and then falls shut again.

Then you’re out on the sidewalk of Montparnasse

with its fumes of tulips and clotted cream

and clotted lungs and cigars and sewers—

even fumes from the lobster who walks on a leash.

And did his owner march slowly

or drag his swimmerets briskly along

through the one man’s Parisian dogturd that is

the other man’s cutting-edge conceptual art?

So long twentieth century, my Pygmalion.

So long rhinoplasty and the tummy tuck.

Let the vowels squeak through my sinuses

like wet sheets hauled on a laundry line’s rusty wheels.

Oh I am not so dumb as people have made me out,

what with your detours when I speak,

and you are not so cruel, though you frightened men off

all those years when I thought I was running the show,

pale ghost who has led me like a knife

continually slicing the future stepped into,

oh rudder/wing flap/daggerboard, my whole life

turning me this way and that.


Languedoc

Southern France, the troubadour age:

all these men running around in frilly sleeves.

Each is looking for a woman he could write a song about—

or the moonlight a woman, the red wine a woman,

there is even a woman called the Albigensian Crusade.

It’s the tail end of the Dark Age

but if we wait a little longer it’ll be the Renaissance

and the forms of the songs will be named and writ down;

wait: here comes the villanelle, whistling along the pike,

repeating the same words over and over

until I’m afraid my patience with your serenade

runs out: time’s up. Long ago

I might have been attracted by your tights and pantaloons,

but now they just look silly, ditto for your instrument

that looks like a gourd with strings attached

(the problem is always the strings attached).

Langue d’oc, meaning the language of yes, as in

“Do you love me?” Oc. “Even when compared

to her who sports the nipple ring?” Oc oc.

“Will we age gracefully and die appealing deaths?”

Oc oc oc oc.

So much affirmation ends up sounding like

a murder of crows passing overhead

and it is easy to be afraid of crows—

though sometimes you have to start flapping your arms

and follow them. And fly to somewhere the signs say:

Yes Trespassing, Yes Smoking,

Yes Alcohol Allowed on Premises, Yes Shirt Yes Shoes

Yes Service Yes. Yes Loitering

here by this rocky coast whose waves are small

and will not break your neck; this ain’t no ocean, baby,

this is just the sea. Yes Swimming

Yes Bicycles Yes to Nude Sunbathing All Around,

Yes to Herniated Bathing-cappèd Veterans of World War One

and Yes to Leathery Old Lady Joggers.

Yes to their sun visors and varicose veins in back of their knees,

I guess James Joyce did get here first—

sometimes the Europeans seem much more advanced.

But you can’t go through life regretting what you are,

yes, I’m talking to you in the baseball cap,

I’m singing this country-western song that goes: Yeah!

Oc!Yes!Oui!We!—will dive—right—in.


Christmas at Forty

Everyone needs a bosom for a pillow

Lying on the couch, staring up at the tree,

listening to that Indian raga trip-hop music

that one minute sounds like panpipes from Kashmir

and the next like a knife stuck into the speakers;

whammo! it hits: how unexpected life is.

One minute you’re a punk driving around

in Eddie Butterford’s blue Dodge, hashing

out the script for whatever happens next,

something that with any luck’ll be

hallucinogenic . . . but then somehow you end up

with a whole mortgageful of ornaments in the attic

and even a green metal stand to triangulate the trunk.

And all you remember coming in between is a whole

lot of dithering about what to play

on the tape deck next—what was all the worry?

Now, in the pantry, you’ve got bottles

of liqueurs made by obscure sects of Italian monks;

in the bathroom all the vials bequeathed by your beloved

dying friends, who said, Here, take the Demerol

for a rainy day; take the Darvocet, you never know

when you might need it. Back in Eddie’s car

nobody thought death would be the dealer

who someday would drop his manna on us

& if anyone had told me about these snowmen

made from crochet pom-pom balls

I would have said, What are you, nuts?

Sometimes in those days I panhandled

just to feel what it felt like to say, Can I have

a quarter, please? and then to cower in the brimstone

I thought for sure would rain down on my head.

But people just gave me more money than I asked for

and told me to go on home, so okay:

now I’m home. Where I’ve got not just the snowmen

and the tree stand, but also a glass angel for the top—

take that, all you sanctimonious quarter-givers.

No rainy days yet, but in just a minute

I’ll take off my clothes and stomp around

with that strange guy who lives here.

After we drink to the health of the baby Jesus

with that very old brandy made from secret herbs.


Fizz Ed

Hard to pinpoint when the body starts turning.

One minute we’re Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr

heavy-petting in the surf, but then the surf pulls out

sizzling like grease and suddenly we find

ourselves no longer shrouded

by the Pacific Ocean’s glamorous foam.

Instead, I think of seals, all snout and lobe and whisker.

All gluey effluence and ectomorphic musk.

So life heavily petted was not the real goods,

it was just a decoy good—that diverted us

for a season. Before the siege of flatulence

and strange-colored moles that multiply on the neck.

And where was the warning—about how the nose

would come to claim more real estate on the head?

How the bristles multiply in all its openings:

the nostrils’ black forest, the white shrub in each ear?

No matter now, the birds and bees,

but I could have used a little heads-up about the eyebrows

(their mysterious length, their magisterial spread—)

if only to prepare me for this ancient Eastern European poet

speaking through the curved clear wall of my TV.

When his brow dips, the gray curls brush his cheeks

and I’m thinking, Man oh man—

pretty soon this guy is going to take wing.

The Crows Start Demanding Royalties

Of all the birds, they are the ones

who mind their being armless most:

witness how, when they walk, their heads jerk

back and forth like rifle bolts.

How they heave their shoulders into each stride

as if they hoped that by some chance

new bones there would come popping out

with a boxing glove on the end of each.

Little Elvises, the hairdo slicked

with too much grease, they convene on my lawn

to strategize for their class-action suit.

Flight they would trade in a New York minute

for a black muscle car and a fist on the shift

at any stale green light. But here in my yard

by the Jack-in-the-Box Dumpster

they can only fossick in the grass for remnants

of the world’s stale buns. And this

despite all the crow poems that have been written

because men like to see themselves as crows

(the head-jerk performed in the rearview mirror,

the dark brow commanding the rainy weather).

So I think I know how they must feel:

ripped off, shook down, taken to the cleaners.

What they’d like to do now is smash a phone against a wall.

But they can’t, so each one flies to a bare branch and screams.


On the Destruction of the Mir

Every night space junk falls from the sky—

usually a titanium fuel tank. Usually falling

into the ocean, or into nowhere in particular

because ours is a planet of great vacancies,

no matter how much fog would be required

in downtown Tokyo. In the Skylab days

you’d see people on the streets wearing iron

helmets, like centurions. But nowadays

we go bareheaded, as if to say to the heavens:

Wake me when I am someone else.

Like the man whose car made fast acquaintance

with what Yeats would have called the bole of a tree.

And who now believes he has written

many of the latest hits, which he will sing

for you while he splits a cord of wood:

like a virgin—whap!—like a virgin—whap!—

until he’s got enough fuel for the winter

and a million dollars stashed in an offshore bank.

You may think it’s tragic, like my Buddhist friend

who claims that any existence means suffering,

though my gay friend says, Phooey, what about

Oscar night, what about making popcorn

and wrapping up with your sweetie

in that afghan your great-aunt made so long ago?

You don’t have to dwell on the fact that she’s dead

or bring up her last unkempt year in the home,

when she’d ask anyone who walked in the door

to give her a good clunk on the head. Instead,

what about her crocheting these squares

in preposterous colors, orange and green,

though why must their clashing be brought to the fore

if the yarn was enough to keep her happy?

In fact, don’t the clashes light the sparks

in this otherwise corny thing? Which is safer

to make than a hole in the skull to let out

the off-gassing of one’s bad spirits.

As in trepanation performed by the Incas,

who traded their melancholy for a helmet

made from a turtle shell. You never know

when your brain will require such armor—

could happen sometime when you least expect.

Could even happen when you are parked

behind your desk, where a very loud thump

makes you look up to discover a robin

diving into the window again and again.

It is spring, after all, and in its reflection

the bird may have found the perfect mate:

thus doth desire propel us headlong

toward the smash. Don’t even try

translating glass into bird-speak; it only knows

it wants the one who dropped from sight.

Same one who beaned it, same one who’s perched,

glaring back from a bough of the Japanese maple

with its breast fit to burst. And behind the lace

of new leaves, there’s a wallpaper of clouds—

weighing hundreds of tons

but which float nonetheless—

in the blue sky that seemed to fit so well

when we first strapped it on our heads.


Le Deuxième Sexe

The famous Polish poet calls Simone de Beauvoir a Nazi hag

but to me she will always be her famous book,

the one with the Matisse paper cut on the cover,

a sad blue nude I took into the woods.

Where we college girls went to coax the big picture

from her, as if she could tell us how to use

all the strange blades on our Swiss army knives—

the firewood we arranged in either log cabin or tipi,

a little house built to be burned down.

Which could be a metaphor:

Simone as the wind puffing the damp flames,

a cloud with a mouth that became obsolete

once we started using gasoline. Still,

she gave me one lesson that sticks, which is:

do not take a paperback camping in the rain

or it may swell to many times its original size,

and if you start with a big book you’ll end up

with a cinder block. In that vein I pictured Simone as huge

until (much later) I read that her size was near-midget—

imagine, if we took Gertrude Stein, we’d be there still,

trying to build some kind of travois to drag her body out.

The other thing I remember: a word, immanence—

meaning, you get stuck with the cooking and laundry

while the man gets to hit on all your friends in Paris.

Sure you can put the wet book in the oven

and try baking it like a cake. But the seam will stay soggy

even when the pages rise, ruffled like French pastry.

As far as laundry goes, it’s best I steer clear,

what with my tendency to forget the tissues

wadded in my sleeves. What happens is

I think I’m being so careful, and everything

still comes out like the clearing where we woke.

Covered in flakes that were then the real thing:

snow. Which sounds more la-di-da in French.

But then the sun came up and all la neige vanished

like those chapters we grew bored with and had skipped.


The Lord’s Prayer

This is what you remember: not the words

so much as the avalanche they made being said,

how it came or not at all in one rush, one breath,

like a cart lashed to many horses. How the simple

father handed off to a chain of bewilderments

like daily bread, like hollow

and kingdom, imported for what reason

from a different kind of story, the kind with a troll

and horses that lift each foot in turn like a girl’s

bent wrist. Trespass was a sign nailed to a tree,

meaning you couldn’t go any farther, which was why

the lady squatted here to cough out her child,

a story laced inside this one

but more secret. Having to do with

where the baby came from. Having to do

with the father’s name. And long before

you saw the words written or knew much more

than that the black scratches like ants

papered everywhere in human places

were a way of making sound without sound,

the priest’s call-and-response lured you here

to the grove of this secret, the father’s

secret, which you could neither remember at first

nor stop the whoosh of its falling, once it came

in words so hard so furious in their quiet

that to this day you can’t even think

your way through them without moving your lips.

Media reviews

"I have two words for anyone who wants to know why people turn to poetry in times of need: Lucia Perillo. She's the funniest poet writing today, which is saying a lot, since she's also the poet most concerned with the treachery practiced on us daily by our best friends and worst enemies, our bodies. . . . [Luck Is Luck offers] one exquisitely wrought poem after another."
-- David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review

“Luck Is Luck contains Lucia Perillo’s most adventurous poems on subjects as various as original sin and life with an oversize nose. It is a delight to wander with her into strange imaginative territories. Always, I read her poems with surprise and (write it!) jealousy.”
–Billy Collins

“Lucia Perillo’s poems are dazzling tragicomedies of everyday life, buoyant with wit, feeling, and delight in language. She can make a 1950s housecoat seem as exotic as a farthingale, and a rain-soaked paperback swell till it contains the world. It’s hard to imagine the reader who can resist the playful energies and serious charm of Luck Is Luck.”
–Katha Pollitt

“The energy, decisiveness, and humane wisdom of Lucia Perillo’s work are tonic. She is an exhilarating poet.”
–Jonathan Galassi


Praise for the poetry of Lucia Perillo

“Breathtaking and bold in its range of reference and feeling . . . full of energy yet with an eye for the holy and serene.”
–Lorrie Moore

“Engaging and elegant . . . [Perillo’s] ironies are carefully honed. . . . [Her] directness is distinctly refreshing.”
–Los Angeles Times (The Best Poetry of 1999)

“[Perillo] is a genuinely expert teller of anecdotes, with a slightly dizzying ability to weave narrative and self-expression, and wonderful powers of description.”
–Chicago Tribune

“No subject, it seems is too mundane or too exotic for Perillo’s engaging poems.”
–The New Yorker