(
"There is no substitute for dissection."
- Grant's Dissector, 3rd edition
Bony Landmarks
familiar as our own
protuberances, jut out from her skin,
the dripping landscape, sallow monotone
interrupted sometimes by a thin
furrow. Nonetheless, her order's tight
beneath the fatty, thick integument,
awaiting our incisions. She'll invite
the making of an order by intent
instruments where none exists; she'll show
us all cartography as we dissect
her parts away. As easily we'll know
how histories converge here though they've trekked
such wildly different paths: what she might have been; of nomenclature;
all of medicine.
The Back
The clever architecture of the nouns
that make her seems apparent; tendons cleave
to bone in simple angles, fibrous strands
of muscle interweave exactly
where we might expect them to. No need for any
definition here - the fact lies bare
before us, with its elemental form
so easily discernible, as though
she herself could be a language, but
even better, one that we could touch
word by precious word and have its full
extent of meaning in our fingers. So,
we come to know the borders of her large
oblique trapezius, plain as its shape
in sharp fluorescent light. No secrets here,
where the riddles of her body disappear.
Removal of the Heart
Hold the isolated heart on your hand. Look at its
posterior aspect and identify key structures.
And so we did. We cut it out and held
it in our hands. We severed major veins
and arteries to do it. And we slit
it open, letting clots of blood fall out
like ugly pebbles. Then we parceled it
by name, and beam of flesh by beam
of flesh, into its pieces and each space
it occupied, as if the task would lead
us to a meaning, as if by the end
we'd find the heart to be an easy sum
of all those names. But we could never learn
a thing about the motion of a beat
from carrion flesh, even when it sits,
more tangible than textbooks, in our palms.
Viscera
When Auntie Ilar died, I didn't think
of how her body died. Instead, I thought
of the thank you note I never got to send,
but always meant to. And, as though the time
could swallow anguish as it swallows past
success, I tried forgetting, but beneath
this light that burnishes our tools, the same
acrid purple halo of her last
vision, what I only heard about
I say now: how her liver must have swelled
like this one - fruit of the insidious
ripening that slowly ate away
her insides till the pain was all too much
for her to bear, and how her jaundiced eyes
rolled back the hour before she finally fell
unconscious, as the dripping morphine wrote
the final sentence of her history.
It's different here; we only think of death
As the stench of the cadaver lab; a corpse
is our assignment, and despite the pained
expressions the embalming seems to keep
intact, Madame Tussaud would move us more
with waxy scenes of slaughter. Even rare
moments of cognition - painted nails
or wedding rings, a scar behind the ear -
are flitting, and get tossed away as we
dig deep to find the nerve and vein,
important parts we need to see and name.
Orbit and Contents
We've pared her to a hollow shell of bone,
her skull's been emptied too; her single eye
looks out on what's been done to her. She sees
the roiling fluid which dissolved her fat
and skin and flesh to formless sediments.
At least we left her like that, since she will have
No lovely metamorphosis the way
Narcissus turned to flowers when his flesh
had waned to almost nothing. So his name
survives inside a poem while her own,
the only thing she might have owned, is lost
among the names of muscles, bones, and nerves.
For us it's no disaster; we are well
engaged in that deliberate art of losing
which, like dissection, finds its beauty in
a delicate and cruel precision, leaving
us with nothing palpable or whole,
only a mapmaker's sense of direction.
Sabrina Hussain is in the second year of her ob/gyn residency at Albany Medical Center in Albany, NY. Her appearance in HMS Beagle marks her debut as a published poet.
The above illustration is da Vinci's The Principal Organs and Vascular and Urino-Genital Systems of a Woman, c. 1507.
