Luigi Galvani 1737–1798

married a woman who was perfectly happy

                                                                     to turn half their apartment

into a laboratory

                               including the cadavers necessary to her husband’s

explorations in surgery.

                                      He also wrote articles on the ears of birds and

in Latin, an anatomist, standing motionless

                                                                     in the middle of the road

                                                              thinking

that electricity must activate the blood

                                                             while the muscles, themselves

living Leyden jars, flowered among

                                                        those who found it difficult

to believe that electricity is an animal

                                                            lost in a garden of showering towers

and, as with all living things, a certain degree

                                                                         of the domestic filtered down

between his hands to land

                                           in a dusting of involuntary silver across

the surface of every nerve.