Gautier D’Agoty’s Ecorchés

Anatomie des parties de la génération, Paris, 1773

What have they done to deserve this beauty?

Did they, like Marsyas, invite some knife-

wielding god with petty transgressions,

the crime of a few tunes on Athena’s lost flute?

Or were they simply too poor for deep

graves, locked gates, and good husbands

to watch over the mounds of new soil

tossed toward them and their hunted unborn?

Whoever they were, they’re still with us,

posing demurely in suits of blood

and muscle, the bruised shadows

of what skin they do have, purpling like

crushed petunias as they spread their legs

and raise their meaty arms to show

dissected breasts, unfinished infants, sundry

viscera on the ground about their feet

as if this were Thanksgiving and they

cornucopias stuffed with squash and fruit.

And who delivered their sentences?

Surely not the muses who, at least,

let them keep rococo faces. In 1773

the womb and the brain were the last outposts

of the body to be mapped. D’Agoty bought

the rights to Le Blon’s technique of printing

mezzotints and gave these ladies homes

in scientific texts, but anatomists believed

D’Agoty’s prints too gorgeous to be accurate.

Perhaps that’s why they open other wounds

so easily in us. All so like the single rabbit

I downed at twenty with a borrowed rifle,

and then was obligated to see skinned,

first scoring the length of the spine,

then peeling the fur in one steaming piece,

while the perverse uncle who clearly desired

to touch me, instead held up a dripping pelt

in one hand, and in the other, a flayed carcass

still wrapped in its bundle of muscle like a gift.

Copyright Credit: Leslie Adrienne Miller, “Gautier D’Agoty’s Ecorches” from The Resurrection Trade. Copyright © 2007 by Leslie Adrienne Miller. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org

Source: Resurrection Trade (Graywolf Press, 2007)