TWO POEMS
Surgery
After they handed out our new white coats,which during the solemn ceremonyin the wood-paneled auditoriummade me feel less innocent as I pulledon mine, they took us down to the basement.They called it the anatomy lab,to me it seemed more like just a morgue, whitefloor tiles, white fluorescent lights, white bodieswrapped in plastic sheets. I thought briefly ofCasper the Friendly Ghost, but I knewthis was medical school now and they werecadavers, not people, and certainlynot benevolent spirits. On the wallshuge prints of those famous Vesaliusdrawings writhed, dissected human bodies.Back then, I thought I’d become a surgeon,eager to wound others to make healingpossible. I gaped up at them blankly,saw they weren’t all drawn from the same body,and yet they were in the profoundest sensethe same body. They all wore their muscleslike rags, yet their poses suggestednot poverty, but aspiration. Mywhite coat became a disguise, hanging onme like loose skin. They were criminals andbeggars, dead for centuries, yet how theylived, how they must have suffered but weredeprived of rest—and still, how they openedthemselves to us, to our disgusted awe.One in particular beguiled me,unnamed except for the designation DUODECIMA Musculo, his backto us, caught in the act of putting hishands up, as if he wished to demonstratenot the flayed fibers of his existence,through which we could see the guilty white day,but instead cooperation, the pain ofthe impossibility of escape.
