By Marianne Boruch
Because the body really
is Mars, is Earth or Venus or the saddest downsized
Pluto, can be booked, bound, mapped then.
Or rendered like something off the bone, fat just under
the animal skin, to lard,
cheaper, quicker than butter, like stillness
belies restlessness, like every yes
was or will be not, never, no,
none of that.
A full section in such a book
keeps the skeleton quiet. (So untroubled to be specific, to say
femur, rib, half-minute of splendor,
to stare like that
stops time...) Or slick pages and pages given over
to slow the blood, remake muscle, to un-secret
that most mysterious lymph, its arsenal
of glands under the arm, at groin, at neck, awful
ghost lightning in it. Inscrutable.
Complete: because
the whole body ends, remember?
But each ending
goes on and on. Complete: because some
minor genius with a pencil, with ink, with drastic color
makes that arm you've known for years
raw, inside out, near wanton run of red vessel and nerve,
once a sin to look, weirdly now,
what should be hidden. Oh, it's garish
equals austere.
Compute. Does not compute. Tell me.
Then tell me who that
me is, or the
you understood, the any of us, our precious
everything we ever, layer upon
bright layer.
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It has not been the most relaxing week around here, but there were a couple of compensations: Emynn gave me an invitation to Pinterest, which is freakin' addictive, and Sfaith alerted me to the fact that the Colin Firth-Keira Knightley short film Steve was finally on iTunes, so I got to see it. Why do I prefer Colin playing a neurotic loser so much to Colin playing a Beautiful Person? (See yesterday's post.) Anyway, on Friday my compensation was going to the mall looking for a longer chain for the pendant I want to wear with my dress to the Bat Mitzvah and getting to play with beads in Brighton, since they're doing a promotion where if you make a wish list you can win the whole thing. I couldn't do this till I finished and posted my review of Deep Space Nine's "If Wishes Were Horses", which is not one of the greats nor even one of the very goods.
We had dinner with my parents and discussed various extended family matters, including the upcoming Bat Mitzvah, my mother's upcoming birthday, and relatives coming to visit each other. Then we came home for Nikita, watched the Caravaggio episode of Simon Schama's Power of Art because the Mammals episode tonight was about mammals who eat each other, then we caught a few minutes of a show about the Bermuda Triangle that mentioned aliens and I got an overwhelming urge to watch The X-Files' "The Unnatural" which most delightfully is on Amazon Prime. I haven't seen the episode in over a decade and it holds up in every way...the baseball, the aliens, the Mulder/Scully shippiness. Here are some photos from the Frederick Festival of the Farm last fall that I only just am getting around to posting:
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