Lucia PerilloThe Van with the Plane
At first I didn't get it: I thought it was just some scrap metal on the roof of this dented mid-seventies Ford Econoline van with its parrot-yellow burden. Bright mishmash so precarious my heart twitched whenever I had to tail it down the road until one day I woke to it: you blockhead that's a plane. Well I don't know how I missed it--of course it was a plane, disassembled, with one yellow wing pointing sideways from the roof. Fuselage dinged by rocks from the road and two little wheels sticking up from the van-- now when I tally all the pieces, it seems pretty obvious. And I wondered if toting it around would be a burden or more some kind of anti-burden. Because if you drove around with a plane you might feel less fettered than the rest of us: if your life hung around your neck like a concrete Elizabethan ruff you could always ditch that junker van and take off rattling down the runway of the road. But my friends said they'd seen this heap for so long on the road it was like a knock-knock joke heard twice too often. You'll be sorry they said when I went looking for the guy who drove the van, whom I found in the library, beating the dead horse of his plane. Once you got him started it was hard to shut him off: how, if he had field to rise from, he'd fly to Sitka, or Corvallis-- but how does a guy living in a van get a field, you think the IRS just goes around giving people fields for free? The road of his thought was labyrinthine and sometimes ended in the rough of Vietnam or Richard Nixon. He said a plane in pieces still counts as a plane, it was still a good plane, it was just a plane on a van. And of course I liked him better as part and parcel of the van; the actual guy could drive you nuts. All his grace depended on his sitting underneath that plane as it rattles up and down the road like a missile on a train, a warhead full of heavy hydrogen. Because the van reverts to rubbish once the plane takes off. And if my own life is a plane, it's like the Spirit of Saint Louis-- no windshield, just the vantage of a periscope. Forward, onward, never look down--at the burden of these roofs and roads.
Lucia Perillo's fourth book of poetry--Luck is Luck--will be published by Random House in 2005. Her poems and prose have appeared in many magazines, and in the year 2000 she received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. She lives in the electrons at luciaperillo.com and in her meat-cage in Olympia, Washington.
