The Body As Poetry

Because its most defining characteristics lend it physicality, such as the heartbeat of meter and the shapeliness of stanzaic structure, poetry is a useful medium for representing and investigating the human body. That countless poems are penned by medical students honoring those who have donated their bodies so they might learn anatomy underscores this deep connection in the realm of healing. In “wasn’t there once,” poetic metaphor helps us see the body in unexpected ways: “the bones of camellias jut along your roof,/arms spare but womanly—some trees take time dying” evokes both the grace of the human figure and the gradual decline of physical health as we age. Just as a tree loses leaves, the metaphor continues, we see the balding subject of the poem as she is tended to in “your scalp gray,/your flesh beginning to show.” The body’s dissolution is further signified in the shakiness of enjambed lines, as in “your hands too unsteady for the brush, so I/apply rouge for you.” Yet even as it depicts attentive care, the poem explores further what medicine perhaps cannot, as the body’s enduring sensuousness emerges from these images of debility. Medicine’s risk factor of smoking (and the labored breathing it has caused) is also a glimmer of youthful emancipation and glamour. The moving last lines “wasn’t there/once that warm kiss, in the trees, under the blue” remind us that the love poem that is our shared human body never really ends.