Luck Is Luck: Poems (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award) - Hardcover

Perillo, Lucia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 140006323X ISBN 13: 9781400063239

Publisher: Random House, 2005

Synopsis

From the snowy egret to a woman’s floating rib, nudism in America to Holy Communion, Simone de Beauvoir to Nathan’s hot dogs–the subjects in Lucia Perillo’s fourth collection of poetry lift off from surprising places and touch down on new ground. Hers is a vision like no other. In “To My Big Nose,” she muses: “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–.”

Fearless, focused, ironic, irreverent, truly and deeply felt, the poems in Luck Is Luck draw upon the circumstances of being a woman, the harsh realities of nature, the comfort of familiar things, and universally recognizable anxieties about faith and grief, love and desire. In “Languedoc,” she writes, “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).”

Perillo’s versions of nature are always unflinching: “Most days back then I would walk by the shrike tree, / a dead hawthorn at the base of a hill. / The shrike had pinned smaller birds on the tree’s black thorns / and the sun had stripped them of their feathers. / . . . well, hard luck is luck, nonetheless. / With a chunk of sky in each eye socket. / And the pierced heart strung up like a pearl.”

Down-to-earth, full of playful twists of language, and woven from grand themes in an accessible, appealing way, these poems pierce the heart and delight the mind. Not one word is wasted.

About this title

About the Author:

LUCIA PERILLO, a 2000 MacArthur Fellow, has published three previous collections: The Oldest Map with the Name America, The Body Mutinies, for which she won the PEN/Revson Foundation Poetry Fellowship and several other awards, and Dangerous Life, which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, the Atlantic, and The Kenyon Review. They also have been included in the Pushcart and Best American Poetry anthologies.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

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 ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 140006323X
• ISBN 13: 9781400063239
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 98