proud to call me his. / I am the stone. Lost at sea. There is a hole. At my
center. / It takes a special. Power to remain here.
And belong to a different. Man every so often. To
change hands. / I am still dense with value. Why
am I missing the center. / The hands hold me as. The grains
of sand that outline the stone / of Gibraltar. Only the sea is my owning!
Mine. I am. / I am the stone lost at sea. The hole is my center. / Without
me the richest man would not be rich. Several / Others would be evicted.
That is how money works. / I am still dense with value. Right where
I’m missing a center. / So say I cannot reproduce / But am worth
more in baskets than was quarried for. / Am the stone. Lost at
sea. There is a hole. / My center. I am still, I am the missing.
Difference Engine
Born, never asked.
As biofilm huddles
in a freshwater fissure
of the dead sea floor.
Born, never asked.
Like the swollen
recruit at the bottom
of the pyramid.
Born, never asked.
Tasked uniformless
in a torn-open trench
with a machine gun.
Born, never asked.
Into this jetbridge
full of people who.
Who are they.
Born, never asked
to enter the engine.
Engine’s bronze gears
and double-high teeth.
Born, never asked.
Now shivering
down the fire
escape in a column . . .
Enter a window
to a dark room
full of a person.
Add. Exit to shiver
down another
floor. One of us
per column per
floor. The us floor
then leave. On one
floor my difference
is a woman. I add
her. Have I
added no one.
Before this floor.
Make the room
warm enough to feel
my mouth. It stings.
I’m not preparing
to leave. Don’t count-
down. Leave me or
(fissure pyramid jet-
bridge trench eng-
ine) could the funct-
ion be.
Pernkopf Atlas (I)
Volume Two. Thorax, Abdomen and Extremities,
with 378 Illustrations, Most in Color.
Apt that Fig. 1 presents external form of a female
breast and chest, surface, grayscale,
intact and mapped region by region
with a fan of bayonets sketched to this or that
latinate term. Each term a whisper, a small assertion
taken as consent, collateral. As ransom.
Preparatory work done to gain access to deeper
regions (e.g. the cutting of muscles, reflection of parts,
disarticulations and separation of muscles and blood
vessels by means of retractors) has not been explained
in the legends when the steps in the preparation were
self-evident.
The human figure is self-evident, I have often thought—
its only evidence is itself. We draw definitions to learn,
draw nude models in studio classrooms to learn
about shadow, draw the dead to discover what casts it
and why definition does not always suffice.
Draw with Fig. 88, the hand, collateral. An extremity’s
extremity. Fingers, more extreme. Ring
and pinky ones untouched touching the page.
The cut begins at top-center of the middle finger
fingernail down the now-blue tendon
to the watchline. Another cut, perhaps along it.
There is a crease on my wrist where my hairband sits
when I sleep with my hair down. There is always hair
where extremity begins. On pulled-away skin, the flap,
a tattoo which even in death this hand cannot escape,
a signature heavy with, without. Signature
is an invention of death, in fact, like words
themselves. Anatomie des menschen or untermenschen?—
semantics too are life or deadly. And legacy. In Fig. 321:
legacy parallels legs the way a willow in a Viennese garden
affirms and denies the city with its branches. What branch
am I and where do the veins in my left and right hands
coalesce on their long journey back to the heart?
Exquisite drawings make answers too precise.
Did the anatomists ever climb out of themselves
to watch from above, from dorsal then ventral view,
ever survey their desks with watercolors, cadavers,
surrounding brushes, pencils, palettes also
scalpels, forceps, occasionally drawn into view?
This intersection of craft and thought, body at
the center, accretes meaning with every
blot, every nib, I begin
to smell
the flesh
as it gets
torn away,
layers—
lips and
labia—
wettest
in life
sourest
in death
but not
to be mis-
taken for
protest
as my own many-times-great grandfather, grandson of a
Useful Jew applied current to the brain, to cortices
of Prussian soldiers with already-fractured skulls.
And the first Jew to win a Nobel Prize?
He discovered barbituric acid, from which all barbiturates
are still made—no coincidence, as Nobel invented
dynamite, the merchant of death is dead
his premature obituary read before he invented
the prize:
for the advancement
of; for me and
for; for four
dismissed; for
sciens, scientis;
for the opposite
of ephemera;
for the lusty;
for illustrators;
for the
illustrated;
for the illustrious;
for the luster
on the back of a man
waiting to enter
the gas chamber.
The lights
are also hot on the withers of a filly
on a conveyor belt in the modern abattoir.
She might shiver. He will not. Turn a page
and you will wonder what scalding bronze poured
down your trachea might feel like. I feel it now.
I let it harden and if you tear my flesh away you will
do me a favor because Harvard Medical School now boasts
a four-to-one student-to-cadaver ratio and there is a waitlist
to donate, while Burke and Hare’s death masks
wink to each other over clemency in a museum
overseas. Turn a page and you might hear—crunch—
the sound of a stack of paper cut by a guillotine—
crunch—might hear 1,871 slices—crunch—into
the axial plane of a man who killed a man and after 12 years
in a cell was injected, killed. He had offered to be sliced
into millimeter-thick sheets yielding 65 gigabytes of images
to view. Sign me up. I too will get immortal as we build
cathedrals for relics before worship. Now we have a rose
window to replace the old, a better newer millimeter-thin
sta
ined plastinate made from a cross-section
of a noble condemned who gave his body to Science and
the sometimes-true. The wrist slices might replace
our Eucharist, the priest must serve them as the wardens served
two requested cheeseburgers the night of to the to-be-sliced
who refused them. Who is my creator or yours? Fig. 378.
According to the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act
the skin binds a book, by the law of collateral damage.
Pernkopf Atlas (II)
Volume One. Head and Neck. Making love I wonder
were they thinking of it. Of the end as I do each time?
The red of eight years softed pale by their last three months,
by prison, now the pink of the skin between my thumb
and forefinger, almost translucent, not transparent, dumb with
effort stretched in two directions, comfortable when rounded
against this cylinder, pressed against the intimate, inanimate,
against all that stands too tall against liberty. I hear their
sighs with me and go to them. Hear the pink and read red
as the red orchestra, brilliant, uncaptured, never watercolor.
Something flowers in her. So rarely are women criminals
we know little about female parts. So rarely, in fact,
this Nazi anatomy is used to demonstrate that rape
itself is contraception. Yes someone actually believes that,
he lives a short flight from me, a flight to get on which
I wouldn’t even get frisked. Remember that stern airport security
woman in Amsterdam, tight burnt orange with buttons?
Ran her hands all over concentrated two fingers on my labia,
pressed hard into them, why did she let me pass?
I think of her when I slip into kilt and roll the waistband
to make hem clear keen knees more cleanly, unstuck
to the slashes on the backs of them. How clean and tired
the world in which we learn from kin alone. Do not dissect
the frozen fetal pig, delivered from the gray warehouse.
Slice open the pregnant one digging in your yard,
flip it over and make one long clean cut along its pink-gray
underbelly, the squeals will be enveloped by history the hungry,
the shadow amoeba who emerges from your
sternum in these moments for these sounds and scents, reach
through the reddest red and fish out the fetus, relish
the warpaint staining your kilt, make holy stigmata,
laugh and lie on the lawn. Like Manet you will be loathed
for the correct placement of the heart. Cut the umbilical cord
and you can do science. History and men enjoy a peace
they somehow feel they earned by buying bonds or listening to a speech.
Remarkable meaning is accessible by private jet
as there is no difference between holding bonds and holding
someone in them. A bond is a promise to someday release, asking
how to find meaning in such a world misses the point entirely.
This is meaning—spontaneous, organized into new meaning
as currency wanders from cigarette to bully mark in camps
nearby and across the continent as exactly one thought
arranges itself into exactly one action across time
into crimes bigger than we ever meant to contain.
As if Sikhs would give away cured meat for free forever. As if
there were such a thing as death support. As if sex were a moral
act. Our necks sticking to hair, hair standing in for veins,
veins for arteries, are bloodless as carefully drawn legacy,
wan as encephalon drawn in an anatomy book.
Something flowers in her. I feel it too. I lust
as they lust for life and believe: Believe with me
in the just time that lets everything ripen.
Gesture Atlas
Here come the zeppelins
their shapes shadow
distance. Whales that leapt and stayed—
as forecast as all
becomes dirigible. Reverse thrust maneuver for
mooring
and there is a floor. Stepping out on it I press in
with my sock
with the equivocation of a neonate pony
hair matted and
curled by placenta, by the trauma of birth
stained already
as I am now with motion. With
the hurry-fetch-it-now the
will-I-or-will-I-not the am-I-
late-to-touch or the amorous
the space
between my eyes as the primary purpose of
gesture
drawing is to facilitate the study of the human
in motion.
Through the wall someone is
watching.
Through the wall someone is watching
a show.
It is anime—I think—asymptotic legs bloody
but unscratched
from a fall from a tower with
featureless, swift action.
I become drawn and falling. Adopt
the mission
someone is saying. Search now for a missing cat.
I have caves for eyes,
crevasse for nose and I forget the cat.
Find a man.
A man with anamorphic
memory.
He looks sideways into my caves looks
for dun horses aurochs
line of dots in mineral pigment. None of us
have names here.
I suspect him a clone framed into body.
He suspects mine.
Slip hand into shirtsleeve. Find throwing blades.
A tactical
flamethrower and this flame too is a hand.
What is it
to have this world unhanded us.
The alethic,
the incomputable, the lethal
and lethargic?
The lethal mutation, forgetting before
there is anything to
forget. The legal rotation. Angle of Proserpina’s
wrist upturned
with Tamar and Dinah
for Rindr and Cassandra
and Leda and Philomela
Medusa, Lucretia,
the Sabine women—
this is the hand
that says what skin is left
on my shoulder
I will abscond away from memory,
that city
that could be moved to
in a minute. The missing
cat. The none-of-us-have-names-here.
The calisthenic how-
did-I-get-here. The joint crack of who-has-been-
here. Was it
the figure in the convolution of the curtain
I notice now
watching me? The figure presses
the small of my back.
I falter a step and step into a cave.
The hands of men
handle stacks of medallions, chips for the round.
In this cave see
paintings lurid by lichens, crystals and
white
mold someone has tried and failed to treat.
Two caves as the time
my face folded in half and my two eyes met.
Two caves meeting
are not one cave. Motionless inside this kiss
kiss me this figure says play.
Acknowledgments
Many individuals and communities made this book imaginable, then possible. I owe uncountably infinite debts: to the team at Ecco, especially Daniel Halpern, Gabriella Doob, and Carolina Baizan, for the attentiveness and the opportunity; to my teachers; to the students of my teachers
; to my first readers; to my always listeners; to my inspirers, conspirers, mentors, and guiders; to Nature, for not giving up on us just yet; to my family, forever. Thank you.
I am grateful to The Home School, the Artist Development Fund, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, and the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship for vital financial and institutional support.
Several poems rely on research conducted with the help, guidance, and participation of extraordinarily open-minded and generous people. I am especially appreciative of staff and affiliates of the following institutions: the Innocence Project; the Countway Library of Medicine; the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge; the Huntsville Unit; and the Texas Prison Museum.
Notes
I LOOKED ON MY RIGHT HAND AND BEHELD takes its title from Psalm 142:4 (KJV).
THE TAMPING IRON SPEAKS refers to the case of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker, who improbably survived injury: an iron rod shot through Gage’s skull. The tamping iron is currently on display at Countway Library of Medicine.
THE LEVEE SPEAKS draws on court records from the wrongful conviction of Damon Thibodeaux, who in 1996 was charged with strangling his step-cousin to death. After eight hours of questioning, he gave a false confession. He spent fifteen years on death row in Louisiana before being exonerated by DNA testing in 2012.
ON ATRAZINE is for Tyrone Hayes, a biologist, activist, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who discovered that atrazine, an herbicide sprayed on most cornfields in the U.S., causes hermaphroditism in frogs. Syngenta, the company that manufactures the chemical, has attempted to discredit Hayes’s research.