Another Poem

[Nick Capozzoli]

Here's another "medical poem" for Lit Net consideration:

To an Anatomical Model
Museo Spallanzani, Reggio nell’Emilia, Italy

Your arms, dear boy, reach out to cup
The hollow where the anatomist
Dug out your organs after death,
Then lacquered you and stood you up.

In this glass case your leather dried
As your playmates and your doctor died;
They soften slowly under stones
Whose images the rain hones

To smooth at last. I wonder then
On Doomsday’s final hour when
All their dust shall rise and cling
Like fabric, forming double wing

To shoot the void and read His book
And bear the scrutiny of His eyes.
Will he merely read their look
As I do yours, and then surmise

What it was that drove the dust
That once partook of love or lust,
Or softer yet, some sweet intent,
Your face still polished, innocent?

Occasion of the poem=my seeing of this anatomical model in a museum.

[cafolini]

Here's another "medical poem" for Lit Net consideration:

To an Anatomical Model
Museo Spallanzani, Reggio nell’Emilia, Italy

Your arms, dear boy, reach out to cup
The hollow where the anatomist
Dug out your organs after death,
Then lacquered you and stood you up.

In this glass case your leather dried
As your playmates and your doctor died;
They soften slowly under stones
Whose images the rain hones

To smooth at last. I wonder then
On Doomsday’s final hour when
All their dust shall rise and cling
Like fabric, forming double wing

To shoot the void and read His book
And bear the scrutiny of His eyes.
Will he merely read their look
As I do yours, and then surmise

What it was that drove the dust
That once partook of love or lust,
Or softer yet, some sweet intent,
Your face still polished, innocent?

Occasion of the poem=my seeing of this anatomical model in a museum.

Yes. Innocent, my arse.

[Nick Capozzoli]

Yes. Innocent, my arse.

Well, I assumed he was "innocent" and his cadaver wound up in the anatomist's lab after he died of some illness and for some reason
his family "donated the body to science." The body could have been dug up by grave robbers and sold to the anatomist. Perhaps he
didn't have a family. I suppose he could have been an executed criminal and in that sense "not innocent." The body appears to be that
of an adolescent, and in the 17th Century when the model was made children could be executed.

BTW, a few years ago there were some very popular travelling exhibits (from Germany and the PRC) of similar anatomical models, prepared
with more modern techniques. There was a bit of speculation in the press regarding whether or not some of the Chinese specimens were made
from executed prisoners...