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.