Cadaver, Speak

By Marianne Boruch

The hook to this book is full-flower in a quote from Marianne Boruch, describing her time in the cadaver lab: “The cadaver nevertheless pushed me aside to speak for herself, to give her take on dissection and her long life on the planet before she generously gave her body that those doctors-to-be might learn crucial secrets.”

...and another quote: “Some books begin as a dare to the self.”

Boruch is the most recent winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781619321403

Marianne Boruch

Marianne Boruch is the author of five poetry collections and the essay collection Poetry’s Old Air. She has published poems and essays widely in the Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Nation, and other magazines. She teaches in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and in the Department of English at Purdue University, and lives in Purdue, Indiana.

Book preview

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Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

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to Forrest, his first hundred years to come,

and for James Judkins, beloved irrepressible uncle-in-law

They undressed the corpse, but had no time to take the gloves off; a corpse in gloves.

ANTON CHEKHOV

There is great Similarity between a Muscle and a Nerve.

JOHN KEATS

Having run out of paper,

I am writing on your rough draft.

ANNA AKHMATOVA

Contents

Title Page

Note to Reader

Dedication

First

I

Face

Pencil

Old Paintings

Reason

At the Forum

The Small Hours

Skinny Fat

It Could Be

Portrait

Little Wife

Bolus

The Pope under Glass

Tears in Reverse

Turn

Thread

Rom, du bist eine Welt

A Vision

My Ears Aren’t Right

At the Keats House, Rome

Practice Saying

Human Atlas

How Hair Is

Like unto Like

Knowledge

The Souls of the Dead

Read the Gesture

Mind and Body

Hands

II

Cadaver, Speak

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Books by Marianne Boruch

Copyright

Special Thanks

First

it’s given. Then made.

Until the dying one says Dream, undream me.

Fragment to pattern, to inscription

in dust, on leaf, across any

cardboard box in the dumpster.

He climbs a ladder to scrape then paint

one side of the house each summer into fall.

Or he skips a few years. Another winter

ringed by a keyhole. And the door, what of

the hinge, little cry that won’t uncry itself —

I

Face

On winter’s long red-eye out of Anchorage, small lamps

near the floor made

a grainy blurry everything, which meant

awake, then almost, then heads slipping back

or to the side, mouths jarred open.

There are words

bodies vanish to — curved, slumped, relaxed, released.

And a sound, not the underwater lament of the whale, not its

distant me to you, don’t even imagine.

I heard no sad rattle

from the human throat, only the loose tic-tick of it, seats 3A

to 10C, at last the whole cabin caught

in night’s breathing, a dark sandpaper at work, stopped,

to start again.

The fact is I walked through an underworld, that aisle —

I was up, had to — and saw in the dim

not-yet-dawn the arms

and legs of Shiloh and Gettysburg flung

every which way.

Then past that easy horrific —

those strangers merely out, gone out,

curled to each other: love

in the abstract, love

how it never comes on purpose,

no one arranging a face to please or to frighten

into love, just a simple forgetting who

is who and if ever. Like children don’t know the most

troubling thing about themselves, won’t

for years. Or like the dead who could, but can’t tell you.

For once I stared