Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo

      Versus the younger girls’ careful keeping

      one hand pinned against their skirts, against

      the nothing under them and their silk falling.

Skin

      Back then it seemed that wherever a girl took off her clothes

      the police would find her—

      in the backs of cars or beside the dark night ponds, opening

      like a green leaf across

      some boy’s knees, the skin so taut beneath the moon

      it was almost too terrible,

      too beautiful to look at, a tinderbox, though she did not know.

      But the men who came

      beating the night rushes with their flashlights and thighs —

      they knew. About Helen,

      about how a body could cause the fall of Troy and the death

      of a perfectly good king.

      So they read the boy his rights and shoved him spread-legged

      against the car

      while the girl hopped barefoot on the asphalt, cloaked

      in a wool rescue blanket.

      Or sometimes girls fled so their fathers wouldn’t hit them,

      their legs flashing as they ran.

      And the boys were handcuffed just until their wrists had welts

      and let off half a block from home.

      God for how many years did I believe there were truly laws

      against such things,

      laws of adulthood: no yelling out of cars in traffic tunnels,

      no walking without shoes,

      no singing any foolish songs in public places. Or else

      they could lock you in jail

      or condemn your self and soul by telling both your lower-

      and uppercase Catholic fathers.

      And out of all these crimes, unveiling the body was of course

      the worst, as though something

      about the skin’s phosphorescence, its surface as velvet

      as a deer’s new horn,

      could drive not only men but civilization mad, could lead us

      to unspeakable cruelties.

      There were elders who from experience understood these things

      much better than we.

      And it’s true: remembering I had that kind of skin does drive me

      half-crazy with loss.

      Skin like the spathe of a broad white lily

      on the first morning it unfurls.

Inseminator Man

      When I call him back now, he comes dressed in the silver of memory,

      silver coveralls and silver boots

      and a silver hard hat that makes no sense.

      The cows could not bombard his head,

      though the Lilies and the Buttercups, the Jezebels and Mathildas,

      avenged their lot in other ways

      like kicking over a pail or stomping on his foot.

      Blue welt, the small bones come unknitted,

      the big toenail a black cicada peeling off its branch.

      It wasn’t hard to understand their grudge, their harbor

      of accumulated hurts —

      imagine lugging those big tits everywhere, year after year.

      Balloons full of wet concrete

      hung between their legs like scrotums, duplicate and puffed.

      I remember grappling with the nipples

      like a teenage boy in a car’s backseat

      and how the teats would always fill again before I could complete

      their squeezing-out.

      At night, two floors above them in the half-demolished barn,

      my hands ached and made me dream of cows that drained

      until the little stool rose off the ground and I found myself

      dog-paddling in milk.

      The summer after college I’d gone off to live with women

      who’d forsworn straight jobs and underwear and men.

      At night the ten of us linked hands

      around a low wire-spool table before we took our meal of

      vegetables and bread.

      Afterward, from where the barn’s missing wall

      opened out on Mad River, which had no banks but cut an oxbow

      flush with the iridescent swale of the lower fields,

      I saw women bathing, their flanks in the dim light

      rising like mayflies born straight out of the river.

      Everyone else was haying the lower field when he pulled up,

      his van unmarked and streamlined like his wares:

      vials of silvery jism from a bull named Festus

      who — because he’d sired a Jersey that took first place

      at the Vermont State Fair in ’53 —

      was consigned to hurried couplings with an old maple stump

      rigged up with white fur and a beaker.

      When the man appeared I was mucking stalls in such heat

      that I can’t imagine whether or not I would have worn

      my shirt

      or at what point it became clear to me that the bull Festus

      had been dead for years.

      I had this idea the world did not need men:

      not that we would have to kill them personally,

      but through our sustained negligence they would soon die off

      like houseplants. When I pictured the afterlife

      it was like an illustration in one of those Jehovah’s Witness magazines,

      all of us, cows and women, marching on a promised land

      colored that luminous green and disencumbered by breasts.

      I slept in the barn on a pallet of fir limbs,

      ate things I dug out of the woods,

      planned to make love only with women, then changed my mind

      when I realized how much they scared me.