The Anatomist

  You are a union of liquids and solids. The city layers over your skin, becomes your excess. You remain out of reach. Call your feelings “complicity with chance.” Knot your fingers to keep them still. You close your eyes when the light streams in at this angle. You return illegible after each attempt. You self-regulate. In all likelihood, you agree with the following description. You settle for less. You are reduced, by chemical analysis, to essential elements. Your borderline becomes overly familiar, constitutes a doorway passed as routine. You sense the weight of your arms against the edge of the table, the book held open. Involuntary actions afflict your muscles with purpose as measurements replace bodies. You irritably reach after fact and reason. You are performing well from the outside. Every day, in every way, you adjust to cope with the weather. Reconnect with old friends as if you’d never left. You hold your twisted ankle. You dwell in uncertainty. You are a fibre of exceeding fineness, or several fibres bundled together, or a network of tissue, or an arrangement of tissue for a specific function. Through the window, you see a sign that reads, “You are, in following, yourself.” You can either have one or the other. In the objects of your labour you discover yourself. You were a good person and you will be missed. This poem is about you. Make a list of your tasks. You plead guilty on the witness stand. You read the poem differently now. You require nosological coding of causes of death. An outcome in which you dwell. You drive past your hometown, ignore the cut-offs. As you perceive the world around you, it’s always cloudy. You aid in the intonation of the voice. You blanch, hold a mirror to your mouth, wait for condensation to form on the glass. See a dog and recognize a danger to your body. You understand the composition of the material under investigation. You shadow to cop personality. Assemble organs according to your plan or method. You recreate scenes, stage minutia of past experience, to maintain a physical connection. Open your eyes, bridge a binary. You run your nail along the seam of the pillowcase. You read and perceive a shifting collection of cells. You may be classified by etiology, pathogenesis, or symptom. Stuttering names in the phonebook, you imperfectly convert a vocal knot to art. You arbitrarily check boxes on the claims form. “You are here,” written on a cardboard sign. The conceit of this alone makes you melancholy. You are the object of study here. Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes. You perform an important office in the organization. You reread books without remembering them. If you were to burn a bone in a fire for fifteen minutes it would become white and brittle because the animal matter has been destroyed. You isolate readers in the lyric. When you avoid eye contact you look up. Your hands wet with sweat. You might wander into the wilderness alone. Stretch yourself thin. Marginalia skews your interpretation of the text. You forget the combination, the composition. You are not a thing so much as a way things happen. Anything you can do, you can do better. For melodious speaking or singing, you require atmospheric elasticity. You do not read the poem differently now. You can open the door from the inside. Hands in pockets, you shuffle outside the apartment building, waiting for someone to unlock the door. You become a closed system. You feel nostalgia for the good old days. You short circuit. You receive nerve signals from the sympathetic organs. You rewrite an anachronistic schema. Repeat your liquid routines. You, or someone like you. A collection of similar parts, many softer than your bones. It’s your fault. You are a diversity of form and texture.