Molly Anning Observes Her Daughter Practicing Dissection
Between your hands you steady the carcass: size and shape of a loaf. Down its center
you pull the penknife. Discover the first trove of organs that splay
like wood sorrel juts from a stump. Put aside heart and spleen. Draw the glistening
intestines aft. Drape the muscles fore. Something like this resides
in you: organ-meat cached in a bone box. The copper kettle-smell urges you to hurry.
In your haste you rend the muscle. Dismiss the sensation
under your fingers of a membrane thinly-spread. Enter the theatre of bone. At such gravity, pause.
A creature denuded of face turns impossible to judge. There’s a spine
you need to reach. See the brain that cauliflowers in its case. Sprig of wisdom poised
on a wish-stem. Sectioned into its parts, the memory
of movement, relinquished. Slice and magnify tissue: at each sprung room, a half-hinged door
hangs open. Did the beast bear belief as we do? And where dwells
belief? The hands or hooks or fins fall limp and hold not one thing. When you study,
you might be studied, too. God's dark eye peers
as His child carves up creation. The Guest Unseen. Pontius Pilate also owned
such appetite: to behold without touching
flesh, hammer, nail. You plunge your hands into the scarlet tangle like you seek
a confirmation in these forms you cleave.
Or perhaps you imagine to make of yourself a man, one who opens another
without wincing. Do you strive to draw
back the vitals of God’s creatures as I pare the mineral skin from potatoes?
But I see by this lamp’s light
that yours is no cold intention. You bend and gaze like a woman
who memorizes her first
suitor’s letters. Tell me what you read, Child, penned in the silence
of the flesh frame?
Note: This poem comes from Elusive Beasts, a life-in-poems of proto-paleontologist Mary Anning (1799-1847) of Lyme Regis, England. Impoverished for most of her days, Anning persisted in digging up and selling fossils to the wealthy collectors, the academics, and the tourists who visited her shop throughout her too-brief life. To better understand the fossils she collected, Anning on occasion dissected dead animals she came across.