Disposing of the Body — Blackbird Archive

← v4n2, Fall 2005

For the last time, lose this and you lose everything,

perspicuity and elegance, memory, immoderate desires,

the wink of Maya in the Chinese jades

we are loathe to acknowledge.

In the most ghastly example, the lingering flayed man

of Vesalius comes quietly apart for us

in a silent considerate dance on a hill above Padua

saying there is nothing, nothing from the tombs.

Anything left there is still the same old news from the living,

doubled ears of rice in nephrite, stone tears

furrowed like shoestring rills. No reappearing body, no bacillus

wanting so much to take some jewelry, a few dusty jars of food.

There are only reminders how tightening silence’s drawstring bag

is a strange procedure, pressing down at the wrists,

impeding the heartbeat to feel it.

mortality history body

Allan Peterson

Allan Peterson is the author of six collections of poetry, This Luminous : New and Selected Poems , forthcoming from Panhandler Books in 2019; Other Than They Seem (Tupelo Press, 2016), winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Prize; Precarious (42 Miles Press, 2014); Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; As Much As (Salmon Poetry, 2011); and All the Lavish in Common (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Peterson’s work has appeared in AGNI , The Gettysburg Review , The Nation , and ZYZZYVA , as well as several anthologies. He is a recipient of fellowships from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the State of Florida. Peterson is a visual artist as well as a poet and previously served as chair of the Visual Arts Department and director of the Anna Lamar Switzer Center for Visual Arts at Pensacola State College.