In the fall of 2008, I was given the rare chance to attend the Gross Human Anatomy class taught by Professor James Walker in Indiana University’s Medical School on the Purdue Campus where I had been in the English Department nearly three decades. I was also to take the Life Drawing course taught by artist Grace O’Brien in Purdue’s Reuff School of Design, Art, and Performance. This unusual gift of time and circumstance was due to a Faculty Fellowship in the Study of a Second Discipline, an all-university award under the auspices of the Provost’s Office. The point and privilege was to put one’s serious attention into something other, new and unrelated to one’s usual scholarly or creative pursuits. What follows is the start of notes I took that semester on what I observed in both classes, and so began the long unnerving trek toward my eighth collection of poems, Cadaver, Speak, which was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2014. This piece will be included in my memoir, The Figure Going Imaginary, forthcoming from that press.
8/18 CADAVER LAB
I see soaked tube socks on the cadavers’ feet and hands.
Your first patients, says the teacher.
Keep spraying them down with alcohol, fabric softener,
water. Keep them damp.
Take care of your cadaver, he said.
We begin a week earlier than the rest of the campus, go at the skin and work in. “Surface anatomy” by feel, so we palpate. Where muscles attach to bones = kennings. I love that—kennings—old English for phrases that define by metaphor. Like Beowulf’s “raven-harvest” equals “corpse.” And bones articulate.
On a far wall, an old photograph: wooden tables, cadavers there, the every-one-of-themwhite medical students in pale smocks like those worn in art studios over a century ago. In black script below: “University of Pennsylvania, 1909.” And above: “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.” The young men look resigned, staring into the camera which must be five feet off the ground on a long-legged tripod we don’t see, a dark shroud trailing behind where the photographer hides.
means face up, palms open on the table as if the body descended there from some final blue, fell quietly back to earth like a leaf from a great height. Earlier, before we slipped into scrubs and lab coats, a first-day survey:
