Entering the Body

Entering the Body

after Gunter von Hagen’s Body Worlds

All I could think of at first
was cooking. Of that skinned

rabbit in my freezer, fur torn, gaze
jammed between a package of phyllo

and a carton of ice cream.
Of all that succulent meat

dripping from its own skeleton,
sweet marrow and a bottle of merlot, but

even here
I end up in the palace of longing.

Caught in the arms of no arms.
Trying to bend a body

to my own. A skeleton
follows its muscled canvas

and I long
to be inside one, to hold
the other.

But you can’t translate flesh.

Not with polymer, nor contemplation,
not even with a prolonged hand

shake or make out session.
Not in the slow unbuttoning

of a wine-stained blouse or in the stripping
of tendon from bone, muscle filleted

into C-section, pelvis cavity unsewn.
In this case, a uterus

the size of a thumb. Inside me, one jabs
like an eyelash in the heavens (yes,

the heavens). Here in this museum,
two blue eyes drift from two halves

of a severed head. How long do we stare
into mirrors. So long, I know,

my eyes roll
from their pockets till they bump
my tiny

tiny ossicles dripping notes
into my ears, not yet
not yet.

But flesh will not wait.
I want to wrap my arms around this

sculpture’s waist and ask him, anything?
Nuzzle my chin in the meat-cleave

of his shoulder. Play my fingers
over his bones, over his exposed

vertebrae like a vibraphone.
Lick his neck until his brain coral

flowers.