When wind has unwebbed, the barnside travesties may begin.
Dress the part & remain firm in your belief that a vital spring will go slack &
you won’t be able to latch her inside of you, though someone somewhere will
be trying to sell a loosened sole on the idea.
Sit the visiting bereaved on stumps, within the theater, but at a distance
amenable to the disturbances of doctors, interns. Consider that galloned
views are easier to market in fashionable quarters. Blow them out to stark.
•
•
Open along her glossy-leaved (left) side. The
verdant tearing without stakes.
•
•
Philodendron the spectators’ songs along the leaning window’s frame. The mullions
branching into solemn cathedral points will clear your head.
•
•
Record your findings geographically. City plants
remnant in oxygen deep in the bones. Diffenbachia, likely
1999. Fossilized herbitage, city-green (yellow with
fumes) the meat, the betrayer. What she radiated,
walked pointedly & ordered. A thin layer at the outside,
speckled wildflower.
•
•
Having once wanted to be a lawyer & accuse people of crimes of omission, respect the
impulse to absent, to subtle, to leave hidden hardy alone.
•
•
Observe the change in exposed cross-sections. What of
letters, paper-soft & blurred blue? The residue of postage
stamp & envelope lick? The wrist bent so often, the hair
tucked in mannered agitation? Will we find such crinkled
evidence amidst other marrow?
•
•
Fell the empty preserving fluid bottles in clumsy rolling clinks. Dance under scrubs.
The sky will threaten to postpone further examination until tomorrow & scurry the
interns, with instruments, from altar to cabinet.
•
•
Set the bone-stutters in velvet-lined boxes above index
card explanations of origin, destination.
•
•
Return to the operation grounds, the learning stand, early the next morning, before the
sun moves up from behind the trees, newly ordered by the chief pathologist.
•
•
With string, secure the visitors’ suspicions that the
operators are simulacra of the very bodies they
examine. Money will follow, for everyone loves a
tribute to her deceased. & one so fitting!
•
•
Shudder as the animals, slowed to tail, push out their sounds.
Let’s pretend, Leo, that animals need not become human interest stories, that
wolf need not be den mother, maternal instinct; and leopard spots for sexy
underwear, safari-themed stocking stuffer.
We’ll suspend disregard as guard—that license for others to regard regardless.
We’ll hide our secrets under animal fat & felt, send friends telegrams that wink,
“I am still alive.” We’ll stand intent on revision, then tumble the blocks.
We could not have been less known. To movie you—vaguely and specifically
enough: exact amounts of each render transformation for the other.
____________
Sight and sound are record, one day archival with clean capture, proper storage &
careful notes:
Exhib. 2 [photograph]
Wolf, Outcropping, Her-Summer 2001
Exhib. 11 [photograph]
Leopard in his leap, October 2001
Exhib. 33 [audio recording]
Peary caribou choking on its last breath, May 2002
But to have a sense of the others:
Exhib. 17 [whiff in airtight box]
2:00-hot on sorghum shoot, August 10, 2001
Exhib. 41 [licked onto the backside of a postage stamp]
Musk ox gore-with-fur
Exhib. 49 [testicle-with-earthworm]
Viscosity of musk ox gore-with-fur
____________
Pins stab the points on a map of our fraction. To say you knew my healing wrist
once, my tongue in your elbow crook another once.
____________
Flicker this much: width of a pinkie finger (adolescent female), length of a
forearm hair (adult male), depth of depth of depth of depth (newborn).
Too whole is no assertion. Divide with me. Yours.