The Anatomist

(Sir Astley Cooper, 1768-1841)

His was a ghastly business,
or so the public said, though
he knew better: crowds gathered
five deep at each dissection,
grown men who had seemed
at first so cavalier about the corpse
would faint and swoon like women
at the first sight of any bloody organ.

And they were wrong, too,
to call it a business, though
it brought him his living,
and money was exchanged discreetly
to the louts who showed up
at his door in Surgeon’s Square
bearing their newly dead granny
or some stranger, still streaked with muck.

Surely it was an art. The eyeball’s
delicate removal, the labyrinth
of veins and arteries, the incisions
finer than the fine muscles chiseled
on the stomach of Michelangelo’s David.
Even his peers bravoed, gathered
around the theater, as he triumphantly
held up cystic lungs and livers.

And those who most appreciated
his ingenuity were rewarded.
He would scratch the names of friends
into a bone he’d feed the mangy lab dogs,
and when he would dissect them
months later, the bone would be
extracted from the stomach, the name
eaten out by gastric acids in intaglio.

Though even he admitted the artist
is always lonely. Nights, he hefted the scraps
of the dead he had perfected and carried them
stealthily through the London fog
to the corners of the hospital grounds,
where he laid them on the grass
like sleeping children, the vultures
shuffling quietly in the courtyard.
 
 
Colleen Abel was born and raised near Chicago and has lived in a bunch of places since then. Her work has appeared in journals such as Heliotrope, Evansville Review, Bellevue Literary Review and others. A former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at UW-Madison, she was recently a finalist for the Four Way Books Intro Prize and the New Issues Poetry Prize.