The Gross Clinic

I have a sister who takes care of animals, whose artistry is flesh

and blood mixed in with a dream or more

she tries to give her son. He cuts school and drinks with his friends

in the scrub woods behind the school. He thinks he wants to be an

architect;

he thinks the poems he writes are portions of his unmixed spirit.

His habits of mind aren’t settled, ossifying so slowly for many of us,

we can’t know, and no one can tell him anything about cigarettes,

bad drugs, his fragile mortal spiral.

He can’t cry anymore—it’s the wrong style of feeling—,

and he only half knows that like his mother he will have to descend

before he can break into nakedness, as if from the warmed surface

of loam, from slug-soft matter that breathes or suppurates.

My nephew Samuel has the same name as the son of the famous

surgeon

Dr. Gross, painted by the American realist Thomas Eakins.

Samuel chugs gin, takes his tokes, and helps his mother with preps—

a Betadine swabbing, “like a ritual,” out from the site of the incision.

He confuses his mother. In this poem I want to try to stand

at their shoulders in the clinic. I think I could come near to swooning

from the obscene odor in the air, but I can try to imagine

something beyond the surgery, the fur and the glistening

blood, and I wouldn’t leave them.

—

The flight of gray gulls over the bay

accompanied my early wrestling with flesh, “Blue Suede Shoes”

playing on the radio in my parents’ house.

The fluency, then, of hands and lips threw seeds of a sweeter

and more luxuriant fluency when I was thirty.

Then I believed in the beauty of Helen

and sometimes, as the fullest truth, in the colored clouds

above apple trees full of blossoms and the reddened fruit afterwards.

In the end, of course, the fruit turns to mash, and wasps

burrow drunkenly in the meat no longer crisp.

—

There is a terrible beauty in the speeches of Nestor

after Agamemnon has called out the spirit of his army

by inviting them to go home. Imagine the sober tones

of the generals and the old king, his face a lifelong gallery

of portraits, grizzled hair an aura, as he faces

them with his counsel. From his lips a kind of honey

mixing with the bitterness of those two quarreling.

He asks them for their mettle, earth born, and leans,

foreshortened, his robe exposing a scarred and whitened chest.

A vignette of what we cannot learn, or outlast.

—

One who loves earth and the sun and animals

stands over the necrotic thigh of a wolfhound

with scapel and rongeur, a patina of antiseptic

reddening the bare skin around the wound. The odors are a mixture

of rotted flowers and fruit and the beautiful blood oozing from an

incision

above a honeycomb of maggots, swollen, moving.

If you can bear to stand close and look closely at the dissection,

you will feel your own stomach turn and your nerves

grow a little cleaner, and you may feel puzzled how a person

would want to know that much anatomy.

Wasn’t it like this for Michelangelo?

This lesson of body? And the artist’s revulsion, someone trying

to look beyond heroic contours of ruined flesh—

softness of hip and buttocks—into the serum of spirit?

To live while another no longer can live.

This flesh and that muscle, and tinted spring forests, and mausoleums.

Copyright Credit: “The Gross Clinic” by Carol Frost from I Will Say Beauty. © 2003 by Carol Frost. Published by TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.

Source: I Will Say Beauty (TriQuarterly Books, 2003)