The Dead Who
Are Not Raised

by Lynn Domina

From Corporal Works
Four Way Books, 1995

© 1995 by Lynn Domina. Used with permission.

(Posted January 30, 1998 · Issue 24; archived January 30, 1998)

Her life drawing instructor insisted
she visit the Museum of Natural History,
spend a morning before an open sarcophagus,
sketching. The mummy she chooses
had been a woman; someone has removed
the blackened linen strips from her right foreleg,
her hands, her face. Someone has x-rayed
her torso, and someone has printed labels
with arrows pointing to her ribs, her hips
as if in response: yes,
she was a woman.

The labels describe cycles of famine,
ceremonies of burial.
None mentions the guardianship
of the dead woman's mother and lover,
their ache of powerlessness
either to cleanse their grief here
or to forgive the spectators. The woman's spirit
leans above and into the body, face pressing against face,
thigh against thigh, breast against breast.

The student forces her eyes toward the closed eyes,
the tight lids, gaping
follicles, the stretched skin pulling lips
away from teeth, black curves
bounding incisors and jaw.

The small open hands seem to have relinquished
their agony, and the student feels her voyeurism
nearly forgiven, and she nearly believes
they gesture in welcome.

She could begin with these hands
in repose; the charcoal fits itself
against her fingertips as she prepares
to disregard the tibia
jutting through the leg's split skin, the rigid black
layers of muscle insisting on the body's
opaque and private right
to decay.

Lynn Domina received her Ph.D. in English literature from SUNY Stony Brook in 1996 and is currently an Assistant Professor at SUNY Delhi, teaching writing and literature. Her first book, Corporal Works, was published by Four Way Books in 1995; she is working on a second collection of poems.

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