Because the body really is Mars, is Earth or Venus or the saddest downsized Pluto, can be booked, bound, mapped then. Or rendered like something off the bone, fat just under the animal skin, to lard, cheaper, quicker than butter, like stillness belies restlessness, like every yes was or will be not, never, no, none of that. A full section in such a book keeps the skeleton quiet. (So untroubled to be specific, to say femur, rib, half-minute of splendor, to stare like that stops time...) Or slick pages and pages given over to slow the blood, remake muscle, to un-secret that most mysterious lymph, its arsenal of glands under the arm, at groin, at neck, awful ghost lightning in it. Inscrutable. Complete: because the whole body ends, remember? But each ending goes on and on. Complete: because some minor genius with a pencil, with ink, with drastic color makes that arm you've known for years raw, inside out, near wanton run of red vessel and nerve, once a sin to look, weirdly now, what should be hidden. Oh, it's garish equals austere. Compute. Does not compute. Tell me. Then tell me who that me is, or the you understood, the any of us, our precious everything we ever, layer upon bright layer.
Copyright © 2011 by Marianne Boruch. Used with permission of the author.