The Coroner's Beautiful Daughter
On my father's silver tables
men open like books
With a carpenter's precision
he traces T's upon
the body's centre
scalpels doorways into
the heart's chamber
Rooms of ribcages guarded
by the soul's stays, corsetry
of human bone
Each one is different -
how the skin peels back
a Chinese screen of yellowed
vellum
the light
illuminates veins, exposing integument
of viscous
slippery wetness
Sometimes I dream
that the night sky is a body
open and spread above me
The moon an albino heart
paled by formaldehyde
Garlands of adipose
yellow as late autumn flowers
vine beneath skin
My father scrapes
there must be no excess
when laying bare
a body's secrets
robin furth
Life and death are imprinted
like the rings of trees
my father reads intestines
like the forgotten priest of an ancient
brotherhood. All those you love
pass over his stainless steel altar
Worship of the body dissected
its parts numbered and named
The afterlife looks
like my father's laboratory;
diseases photographed and pinned to the walls
like fantastic flowers. Red rash of syphilis
Rosy glow of scarlet fever
I read once of the plague, of the carters who
sang as they collected the dead
My father whistles a tune as
he cuts, transcribing pathways
of crippled veins, arteries clogging
like lifetimes of dissatisfactions
I am learning to suture with
clear thread; tiny stitches
like old scars
Relatives see the skin
as another seamed garment,
A piece of clothing that must be darned,
laundered and finally folded
into a forgotten drawer
The dead sleep
more peacefully than the living
Each night, before bed, I stroke their foreheads
and kiss their eyes
My father's shelves are adorned with
the trophies of his profession:
pale, fraying tumours, jaundiced kidneys
a cancerous womb cradling a fetus small
as a tear-drop
Evenings beneath the harsh florescent lights
I braid my yellow hair and wrap it around my head
like a delicate intestine
My father strokes it and calls me
a good girl
The day's work done, I wash my hands
and lay the final, ritual meal upon
tomorrow's sutured body.
We eat in silence.
Page(s) 40-41
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