BODY WORLD(S)

Death will return us to that condition of tranquility which we enjoyed before we were born.
—Seneca

It’s a bit too easy, too cute:
the little kid, who calls the plastinate manikins naked,
plays a game pointing out his father’s nose, his ears, his mouth
facing the annotated banner of Vesalius’ Anatomy Theater,
behind the bastardized Nietzsche quote and delineated Hamlet
near the display case of blackened smokers’ lungs,
next to the exploded, tripartite gymnast

despite the parental warnings, oblivious to his education,

oblivious to his mother, the pregnant one the teenage girls keep an eye on
who goes behind the discrete black curtain to see the fetuses.

The docent comes over, tells them in her loud whisper
to quiet down. As if we were in the presence of the dead
who by definition must—right?—decompose, or at least decay,

must be some fraction water, to deserve reverence.

Rumormongers say these are smuggled Chinese corpses,
sex-slaves and executions, victims of some version of a long knife.
Ask these Körperkunste if their body art achieves the advertised Gestalt,
if they’ve found a rift where love and hate and world and earth
no longer strive.
Regardless of provenance or fiat these grim immortalists,
as Tu Fu might have said, have no tea in them.

The father and his son move on and the boy
takes interest in the flayed Skin Man, who holds aloft his epidermis
which the kid keeps calling a popped balloon.

One only hopes the installation’s thesis—
knowledge of the flesh, even (especially) humorless flesh without
its data, will give you peace with death—
is lost on him.