They’ve Skinned the Dead
While touring Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds Exhibit in Denver, CO
Walking the exhibit where they’ve skinned the dead
and positioned them like ice skaters, lovers, archers,
I should be contemplating mortality and matter,
the slowly failing connections
of bone, ligament, and muscle,
but I can’t stop staring at the penises.
I circle the glass enclosures for better angles,
and the curator claims everything is real,
but the dicks look plastic and white,
like the non-smoker’s lungs
at the entrance of this aesthetic meat locker.
Jillian refuses to walk with me
after “The Hurdler” brings me to laughter.
It’s the athlete’s scissored legs,
the closeness of hurdle and plastic member.
I cringe at possible collision,
my hands involuntarily cup my groin.
Then: I imagine the intern positioning the scene
with hanging body and obstacle,
the smoking artist demanding,
drag the hurdle closer.
At the heart display,
a boy and his parents
hover over the spot lit corner case.
They point, bow their heads in unison,
then quiet suddenly,
and the boy keeps his eyes
open during the prayer.
He’s studying the fist-sized organ,
stares it down like it’s the last
unknowable thing in the universe,
and it isn’t until they pass me that
I notice the protrusion,
the baseball-sized bulge
under the boy’s 49ers shirt,
directly over his heart.
If they have to go back in
will he waive off the drugs,
and beg to peek at the one muscle
throbbing him alive?
One cut cadaver displays his snaking entrails,
another grabs her knees,
arching open a neatly rowed spinal column,
and there’s an unwrapped, sinewy pair
fighting for a hockey puck with plastic helmets,
ice skates, and regulation sticks.
Did these men know what they
signed up for when they donated their bodies?
Did they ever play hockey,
or is this is their first time?
My body numbs to this fleshless art,
to brains and blood vessels and penises and disease.
I figure I won’t be able to eat meat for a week
when I spot Jillian, stone-faced hypnotized
in front of a series of lit glasses.
It’s a room of fetuses from five-weeks on,
preserved whiter than the non-smoker’s lungs.
One glass holds a nine-week fetus,
same age as the one Jillian warms inside her,
and she reaches out to touch the glass
but uniformed security warns, Can’t touch,
so she feels her own body, just below the belt,
and we watch the suspended replica of our child,
curled and quiet, float.
| Jesse Goolsby |
|
levelheaded: They’ve Skinned the Dead
For those of our readers not familiar with the exhibit, Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds is built around “plastinated” corpses positioned in familiar poses—“like ice skaters, lovers, archers”—ostensibly to teach people about health and anatomy and biology. Under a title that sounds pulled from a record store’s heavy metal section, “They’ve Skinned the Dead” approaches the exhibit with a gentle, surprising humor and a contagious sense of wonder.
Initially, the speaker takes on the ancient, venerable tradition of the dick joke. He says, “I should be contemplating mortality and matter, / the slowly failing connections / of bone, ligament, and muscle, / but I can’t stop staring at the penises.” It is a funny and surprising moment, but it also does consider a bit of “mortality and matter.” When the speaker notices “the closeness of the hurdle and the plastic member,” he notes the nearly miraculous calculations humans make when they leap a hurdle or lasso a heifer or drive 70 mph through traffic. And when the speaker sees “the smoking artist, demanding / drag the hurdle closer[,]” he points out the tiny choices and exaggerations artists make to dramatically alter the way we see the world. These first stanzas aren’t simply a dick joke—they are a grand, ambitiously wrought dick joke, a dick joke with layers.
Though the poem begins humorously, it turns serious when a boy with an apparent heart condition pauses “[a]t the heart display.” That the boy conceals a “baseball-sized bulge / under [his] 49ers shirt” and that he’s surrounded by feats of contrived athleticism (“Did they ever play hockey, / or is this their first time?”) make this one of the most subtle moments in the poem. Whether or not the boy is limited by his own disability, it’s clear that what’s most interesting to him is “the one muscle / throbbing him alive[.]” It’s a touching moment not only because a boy is coming face to face with an organ that’s presumably defined his life, but also because the boy’s moment of precocious awe is set starkly against his implied, appropriately boyish love of sports.
In the final stanzas, after a quick joke about eating meat, the speaker is allowed his own vicarious moment of deep emotion in response to the bodies of Body Works. We aren’t told precisely what Jillian feels, “stone-faced hypnotized” by an exhibit of preserved fetuses. We do understand that something serious is happening, and her unspecified emotions course back through the speaker. This is where the poem makes the philosophical point that art’s ability to hold sway over us is determined by its ability to make us feel. Something seems inappropriate about calling the exhibits of Body Worlds “art,” but the variety and careful arrangement of these bodies seems intent on eliciting an emotional response. Goolsby’s poem grants these exhibits a capacity to help us draw connections between ourselves and the world around—and within—us. When his speaker calls one preserved fetus a “suspended replica of our child,” he reinforces the idea that a “replica,” a representation, a piece of art, can shed some light on our reality—a reality that contains crude jokes and deep pathos, beauty and horror, life and death.
-The Editors
