His Right Leg
A note pinned to the thigh reserves it,
the whole cadaver is parceled off.
Legs are a late harvest of the indigent.
Their limbs carry a visual poverty
long after the body is plucked.
In a small room, I separate
muscle groups, filter large blood vessels
from fibrous runnels.
My scalpel seeking out fascial planes.
The leg is devolving to scraps,
yet ingrained in the tissue,
I sense residual shades of a life.
Seaside postcards and old photographs,
war ribbons and yellowed newspaper clippings.
The gray flesh retains its memories.
There’s a wife behind his knee,
bone whittling winds have not erased her features,
her youthful form still entwined
around ashen ligaments.
A child climbs up from an ankle bone,
as a sinewy plasma -
it has no substance of its own,
but borrows and gathers a varicose presence.
Sights and scenes invest
a limbs mangled landscape.
Images that can’t be cut away
by living hands.
Some imagine they dissect a limb,
but I turn bloodless pages,
read images once squirreled away,
that now form these sinews
of a journey’s end.
Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2019
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