a suicide mission: there was glory ahead
when we signed on, clambered into the wagon,
and let the future hitch up its horse.
A Romance
I saw a child set down her binder like a wall
through the candy bin at the Corner Luncheonette
so she could scoop out gum while she spoke to the clerk—
and from that moment was in love: Oh theft.
College was supposed to straighten me
like a bent tree strangled by a wire,
but being done with sweetness I could not resist the lure of meat.
How the red muscle gleamed in its shiny wrap,
a wedge that had once been the thigh or the loin
of a slow brute’s body, sugar-dirt and clotted grass
to be snatched in an instant
and zipped into the crone-y-est of pocketbooks.
Radiance housed in rawhide again, as when it was living.
A steak can be stuck in your jeans when you’re skinny,
a rump roast is right for a puffy down coat,
small chops will fit under a thin peasant blouse
where it falls off the breasts
like a woodland river
with a limestone amphitheater underneath.
Ancient city, ancient sublet, ancient wooden fire escape—
with my other bandits I learned to say how-de-do in French.
We were yanking on the cord that would start the motor of our lives
though we did not have the choke adjusted yet.
Sometimes it seemed I floated in the dregs like a tea bag
bloating up with facts.
Until a girl ran in the door, panting hard, face red,
slab thudding
from her snowflake-damasked waist onto the table,
and we stood around it gawking at the way it seemed to breathe.
Notes from My Apprenticeship
COMPARATIVE MORPHOLOGY OF THE VERTEBRATES
Knowledge shipped north in white plastic buckets.
To pry the lid off was to open a tomb.
We began with the shark
and worked our way up through the frog and the dove—
each month we groped the swamp like fugitives
to raise the next ghoul on the syllabus.
With a bright blade I sliced through the pelt’s wet mess,
exposing the viscera inside, tinted with latex
— blue for the veins, yellow for lymph—
it made me feel childish to see how far
somebody thought I needed the body to be
dumbed down. Outside was dumbed down
by late day’s half-dark, as snowflakes dropped into
Lac Saint-Louis, paddled in silence by great northern pike,
their insides mangled by old hooks.
No place in them conformed to its
depiction in the charts, but the first lesson
was sameness: from the frog in one bucket
to the frog in the next—
no surprises ahead in the formaldehyde of my life:
obedient fugitive,
go on,
roll up your sleeve,
plunge your arm in.
WHITE RAT
Etherized in a bell jar, they resembled tiny sandbags, stacked
We carried each by its tail, their feet like newborn grappling hooks
Their insides had vaginal qualities, pink and wet and gleaming
The tissue hummed
My scalpel got jittery
I sewed up my rat as soon as I could
Because I realized the spiderwebstuff holding us here is thin
It was in fact difficult to account for all the people walking around not dead
I don’t think I ever cut the gland I was supposed to, out
In the coming weeks, in lab-light, I made up little prayers-slash-songs
Like: Please white rat
Let me not have damaged you
You to whom I will be shackled all my years
You out of all your million brethren
If not genetically identical, then close
My rat went back to its Tupperware basin
With the cedar chips and the drinking bottle
That went chingle chingle whenever water was sipped
Which reassured me, knowing my rat was staying well hydrated
Though most of them languished
Which was, after all, their purpose
Though my rat stayed fat
Suggesting I’d botched the job of excising its adrenal
Not that its fatness saved it in the end
When all the living ones were gassed
Because the Christmas break had nearly come
Because of the deadline for the postmortem dissection
And time for the final roundup of facts
Oh rat
As you snuffle through your next incarnation
Say as my albino postman
Or my Japanese neurologist who taps her mallet on my knee
While I try not to visualize myself with your pink eyes and flaky scalp
Your scabrous tail especially
Because I have killed plenty of other things
But none of them have claimed me the way you did
THE TURTLE’S HEART
When we arrived, each belly-shell had a hole
whose clean edge signified that a power tool had been used
by the glamorous lab assistant
still wearing her goggles,
her long hair puffed up by the grimy rubber strap.
When I looked down, there was the heart
bumping in the hole,
and when I looked sideways
my braid dipped in like a paintbrush.
Summers I spent in a WPA hut
where the turtles lived outside in a mortared pit.
Their beaks would strain open
for the pink gobs of dog food
riding the tines of battered forks my job was to clamp
into the dark hands of juvenile delinquents from the city.
One night a raccoon, or a fox, I don’t know, climbed in
and opened the turtles as if they were clams
and left the hearts stretched on the ramparts
like surreal clocks—
even my thuggiest felon shivered as they ticked.
Little motorized phlegm-ball, little plug of chewing gum,
your secret is your frailty
once your outer walls are breached.
Makes me think of that submarine buried under the sea,
the sailors banging on the pipes
as if the water had ears.
Back in the lab, we fished up from the hole
the muscle’s pointy end and tied it
to an oscillograph whose pen-arm moved at first in even sweeps.
Until a drop
of substance X made the graph go wild—
the heart scrawling in its feral penmanship
see what little of yourself you own.
DENVER WILDLIFE RESEARCH CENTER
The coyotes had to eat, which was the reason for the few bedraggled sheep kept in a pasture by the freeway.
We entered wearing coveralls stamped Property of the United States, the crotch of mine holstering my knees, while my tall boss strained the hem of his armpit when he lifted his pistol.