Violent analysis
You’ll find bodies
are all the same:
grids, unstrung tendons,
kidneys, sanctity
of the stomach.
You’ll find vivisection
a kind of flirtation. You’ll find
bodies to be differing
translations. A plum
is made of exocarp,
mesocarp, endocarp
and so is a peach.
Each skull is lined with hard
mother, spidery mother,
soft mother—these divide brain
from skull and you’ll divide
them, cut cell-thick slices you’ll drape
across slides and hold up to
the light. A kind of protection.
A kind of creation, the first
kind: light from dark, form
from formlessness, muscle from
bone. Your outflung limbs,
unlike a cat’s only because
of what you dissect with them.
To separate is to make
better, to make useful: a frog
or stray cat pulled apart
in my hands, the gloves
that divide them. What
could have offended you—
leaky arteries, unspooled
intestines, an idle appendix?
The discarding of these?
No matter. Anyway—you’ll find—
the earth keeps everything.