Gray's Anatomy: The Poems

Gray’s Anatomy
The Poems
by

Christopher Anthony Leibow
Copyright 2012

Introduction
This collection of poems was inspired by the
images found in the 1918 edition of Gray’s
Anatomy. Though Gray’s Anatomy lacks the
theater of the early renaissance anatomist /
engravers, the numerous images have an
intriguing beauty and familiarity. This unknown
geography of interiority has captivated human
kind, maybe since the first wound issued forth
blood and revealed and alien inner self, the
manifestation of the other within. These poems
have emerged from the image that precedes it.
They are not an attempt to write to the image but
to find inspiration from the image.

“Looke on againe, the faire text better trie:
What blushing notes does thou in margine see?”
Sidney, Astrophil and Stella

c.a. leibow
Salt Lake City 2004

The sight of our internal organs is denied us. To how many is it given to
look upon their own spleens, their hearts and live? The living geography of
the human body is Medusa’s head one glimpse of which will render blind
the presumptuous eye.
Richard Selzer, Confessions of a Knife.

fig. #123

At the base of her spine
an apostrophe

A possessiveness'

{Scrimshaw}

Like on the whalebones
Of gutted Humpbacks

She sings

Her cry somehow

as beautiful.

As the harpoon
between the 3rd and 4th ribs.

fig. #17

My beginning was without observer

Unconscious

I saw a black dog cross the street
my placenta in his jaws

Part
of me buried in a cemetery

Burial shroud. Swaddling clothes.

Trying to get in, Trying to get out.

fig. #515

There was no way of explaining the sudden turn of events.
The instantaneous reversal of

you being you but not exactly you
and the way you carried the knife
Cavalier and bloody.

fig. #1158

I asked her if I was imposing.
She refused to respond.

I asked her if I was intruding,
She lay down and stared at the ceiling.

Do you love me?

fig. #214

It was like that
It was always like that.

{repeat if necessary}

In 1930 the bridge across the river collapsed
like a plea…. 12 people died.

She never called.

I still don’t know why.

fig. #1218

Even lingering
it comes all of a sudden

an open mouth

ashen wax effigy

The family gathers

Your body a contested territory.

fig. #932

Short order alchemist
Limited repertoire.

Not much time for anything else.

The young waitress brushes her breasts
against his arm.

Underneath.

electrical storms.

Man is only man on the surface. Lift the skin, dissect: here the machineries
begin. Then you lose yourself in an unfathomable sustenance, alien to
everything you know and yet of the essence.
Paul Valery, Cahier B

fig. #884

His face stained with history.
peeling away the narrative
of someone else's deceased

raising the dead
incomplete
2 dimensional

sculpting bodies out of wax
mouths gapping...

fig. #803

I built a house out of bandages
lay down on the bed.

A knife and a mirror

Her hands were cold instruments.

fig. #877

a dying fish mouths the words
of longing
Confusing the blue sky
for {with} in

love.

fig. #220

Ruins.
A harbinger of dissolution.

Deconstructed.
Sediments of process.

Once upon a time….

I vaguely remember
learning to tie my shoes.

fig #113

I was born without a rattle.
I was stolen by indifference that filed me away.
I fell asleep a poet and woke up a plumber.
I was a mechanical nightingale caught in a cage.

I could never stop her from crying.

fig. #377

The decisions I make

prerecorded?

Each woman I love a similitude of the
Other

Archetypal.

Love of the mother.
Love of the father.

Repetition.
Puling the thread.

The same unraveling.

fig. #319

I was carried in her belly.
Curled up dreamt of parasite
squirming in my sack of sea.

Osteo-Centric cherubim
splitting the very base of her
innocence with my

protrusion.

fig. #148

I have the same nightmare

I am falling
I am flying
I cannot move

I kill them all

fascinated by the whiteness.

fig. #251

There is no way to determine
The cause
The moment of the rupture

It is a matter of continuous pressure

the day the fissure was noticed
I was sitting under
tree eating
my bitter leg of lamb
not even thinking of Mary.

fig. #541

They were the same
The same in each aspect

The knife articulated their difference

Now only the one

fig. #151

Slideshow,
Picture bone,

A box
A flash!

A red spot follows my eyes.

I have cut mine owne Anatomy, dissected myself, and they are gone to read
upon me.
John Donne, Devotions,45

fig. #98

I’ dream of flight

Busy determining the laws
that makes it impossible

Breaking the traditions of my fathers,
Flayed Icarus,
I make a flying machine of bones.

fig. #629

My mother was a stranger
to herself

Highway men kidnapped her
when I was five

only her likeness left behind

I feed her effigy spoonfuls
of forked tongues

while gnats cloud around her head.

fig. #1014

He spoke in semaphore

the maid shakes her head emphatically

in agreement

washing blood from the sheets

fig. #996

It wasn’t at all like she said.
I mean the way the light collapsed all around her.
A gravity that couldn’t be explained by tea leaves
at the bottom of a cup.

She told me it was nothing to be concerned about.
I was concerned.

{about the deliberations of the doctors}.

So a man hands me a pulley,
tells me that there will be an abnormal tide,

microscopic phytoplanktons making it glow.

fig. #667

The naming of my pains does nothing.

circuitous classifications
refusing semantics.

I keep moving

serpentine.

{triangulation difficult}.

fig. #608

On the spectrograph
something was wrong

After deliberations with her colleagues
the results confirmed

My birth was spurious,
a conspiracy of want;

The doctor apologizes,

“Sometimes this happens.”

fig. #95

to live

longer than your child

to be left {on the platform}

the long cry pulling away from the cemetery.

to grow old,

Disappointed.

fig. #84

I follow her spine
mapping ranges

The cartography of desire

looking for a way in.

fig. #1171

In that moment of breath
where what, that is,

No longer a dream. A surprising
sudden surging hesitation.

On the dresser a photograph
an obsessive attachment to the dead,

blood rushes to parts,

swollen.

Then let me be
Thy cut Anatomie,
And in each mangled part my heart you’l see.

Richard Loveless

fig. #1152

Birds of love nesting
below mid-line

Axis of procreative flywheel.
friction of flight -

Explosion of wings.

Repose.

A stone in the throat.

fig. #1018

The veal was familiar.

kept from motion
stagnant as water

the lack of exertion limits
blood supply.

I am sold daily by the pound.

fig. #997

He was a good man
spoke in deliberate sentences.

wore Black October
like a newly starched shirt

held his heart {tight-fisted}
rationing each day.

I tried x-rays to find him.

There was nothing to be done.

fig. #585

The theater is filled to capacity.
A young man leans forward

as the dissector opens
the abdomen a sudden issuing

of intestines.

Vesalian woodcuts
subtext of ruin.

fig. #239

We live in a hole of
regret for the thing

we have left undone, living in an
apprehension that found us with

coins covering our eyes.
You look to the night sky

and turn away from the stars
and their shaking heads.

fig. #963

It wasn’t as I thought
the way in was fraught with omens.

There were precipitous indications
of my misguided annexation.

Small details overlooked.
A man standing in the street light.

fig. #956

The angels gather around in a circle
looking at a dead bird.

‘It is like us.”

They sing hymns
and the dead bird flies to heaven

a less experienced [{death}, {reassigned}]
angel whispers

“We are of the same meaning”

The angels take to the air but one
who sits and preened his wings

with his golden beak.

Gray's Anatomy: The Poems

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