Crash Course in Semiotics
1.
“Naked woman surrounded by police”: that’s one way
to start the poem. But would she mean anything
devoid of her context, in this case a lushly
late-August deciduous forest, some maple,
mostly oak? She carries no prop—for example,
no bike chain, which the cops could be sawing
from the tree trunk that she’s wedded to her body.
But let’s start with her pure, and untranslated,
as the famous cartoon of the door is a mystery
until we post the word LADIES at a point that would be
four feet up from the ground if this door
were not drawn two inches tall—it’s us,
you see, who make believe it corresponds
to a “true-life” human door. Does it help
if I say the naked woman is “really” my true-
life friend, she of the tangled dago surname
we don’t need to get into here? And if I say next
that she has been swimming—in Lake Tiorati—
2.
you can see how straightaway the tangling subdivides
into (a) where the hell is Lake Tiorati?
and (b) why naked?—to the last let me answer
that it’s 1978 and she is twenty; at college
she’s been reading Simone de Beauvoir and learning
words like patriarchy and oppression.
And these have been Mixmastered into her thinking
even about swimsuits—i.e., that not to wear one
is to rip the sign off the door and stomp it
underfoot. When she lies on a rock
the last thing she expects is the tingling
she feels now against her wrist, from a guy
peeing brazenly at her perimeter. This
is an impasse whose bud she thought she had nipped
by aggravating her muscles into interlaced mounds
so her body resembles a relief map of the Appalachians.
In whose northernmost range this story unfolds
& hence the much-delayed answer to item (a), above.
3.
“Naked woman dadadadada police”: not a story but words
at the end of a chain whose first link is her realizing
that the Puerto Rican kids across the lake
splashing and whooping are not having fun—
though this is the sign that she’d stuck on their door.
No, there’s another word for the kid
slapping his palms on the water:
Drowning. Even the urinater abruptly stops
his stream and stumbles back from her, ashamed.
And because she’s the one with the lifeguard build
and because all the guys are much too drunk,
without even thinking she finds herself paddling
toward the spot these kids are now screaming Julio! at,
where she draws a mental X upon the water.
Of course, it is a fantasy, the correspondence
that would make a drawing equal life, and so
you understand how amazing it is, when she dives
to the bottom and her hand happens on the child.
4.
Perhaps what she expected was for the men on shore
to pay her no mind, as in Manet’s Déjeuner . . . :
the naked woman sits among them, yet she is a ghost.
But the kids keep yelling Julio! even after
she’s hauled the wet one out, the one
she points to: Julio okay. No, they shriek,
Julio otro! words she knows just enough Spanish
to know mean there’s another Julio in the lake.
Whom she cannot save despite her next round of diving,
which lasts until the cops come hiking down the trail
in their cop shoes. Then she comes ashore
and stands shivering among them, telling the story
calmly enough until she ends it with: for Christ’s sake
can’t anyone give her a T-shirt? They’re staring
as if somehow she’s what’s to blame, seeing a naked
woman, not the miracle. Which is, of course,
the living boy, that with these words—Julio otro!—
we manage to make sense to anyone at all.
Copyright Credit: Lucia Perillo, "Crash Course in Semiotics" from Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Copyright © 2016 by Lucia Perillo. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)