1753 c/o Scott Riley Irvine

Wind

It resides in the white on white on white. A caress across the Westerlies. A scowling portent before the squall. Its muscles contract around us, somewhat over your shoulders and hemmed to the contour of my murmuring freckles. We may have known it as a foe to have appeared in the sky. One with curls that grow through whiplashed men in robes. An atmosphere that hides itself within swollen jowls. We could have been dismembered among the doldrums.


Ward

Off a beaten road; a place hidden but with a beautiful view. Scrap metal beneath the sun dilute. I feel I’ve been wrung like syrup from some pink or purple fruit. Remote and soaking glare, our mouths quietly move for one another. An abandoned prison, concealed with the century. The damp cardboard and empty cells. You make a face behind a wall of thick glass. Bedpans and leather straps litter the floor of an infirmary. These walls would use unkind words. I think you’re right about that. If you pare the concrete from a concrete wall, what’s left except jagged steel rods? The skeleton of it all, rusting.


Wolf

We could feel the nearer enchantment of another body cleaving the wrinkled swaths of the forest. Exhaling into the noxious night. Our confluence twined closer by the hour. The sun settled; the dark grew. Somewhere in the distance, a bristled haunch caught light. Our new friend had fur. The moon proved past to move. Ugly is upon closer inspection, we realized. The diphthongs in its throat have yet to coarsen its coat but the effluvium tasted the same. The melancholy of a walk through a forest alone, the same. We can bare our teeth too. The same, the same, the same.

1682 c/o Scott Riley Irvine

Perfect Need and Perfect Completion

Rough Translation

"I am the state."

Omitted

"The sun rooms and long showers, the culture of minerals beneath my skin, ancient monuments both fallen and erect – if it all were nothing then could we understand perfect need and perfect completion? Bodies vie for occupancy within my borders, but soon I will be distended and ugly. The depravities of man outweigh whatever else remains. If centralized, little recognizable is left. I am the carrier of a disease. Versailles is therefore something more. Nature is keen to disavow such incubation. Consequence, it seems, is slow to arrive. Until that time, my role will do."

Rough Translation

"He loved this house with a boundless passion."

Omitted

"The coldest of the palace's rooms were those that hadn't even been built yet, if the word 'built' is operative. We still don't understand their collective presence, where those long halls arrived from and how we had come to be within them. The Grand Stables, the chapel, the ornate nooks where partygoers would fornicate against plated bronze. Each insufferably cold. But he wore furs, the leggings of a thinner man. Danced in an ellipse, phasing the room silent, corner by corner. We’ve known the Sun God to experience transits of lesser celestial bodies. Architects of note. Interior decorators dusted with plaster and recommendation. Each shivering insufferably. He loved this house with a boundless passion. He basked in the chill with unmatched contentment. A new room each morning. Immobile against the tiled floor, regarding the construction around him less than if it were entirely still. Men stepping over his nude body, concordant with prior instruction, only a brief prayer to be whispered as their bodies passed. And so a home was built around our King, supine rather like a sundial. We several aids, ambassadors, beckoned or forced into carriages and brought to its steps. Years passing into slow spiritual divorce. Insufferable winters each."

Rough Translation

"Don't be so lazy, like some of the beautiful people at Versailles, who eventually had their heads cut off for it".

Omitted

"Their ghosts spurned by the chandelier maidens, locks rippling or bunned, holding infinite gold before the Hall of Mirrors. In a world without skin, even the viceroys can’t grind an interpretation from the twin expressions strung across the window light. They’ll scrutinize for hours and come up with givens, such as Don’t be so lucid. Don’t metabolize. Don’t be so confessional, like every omen expressed through the lattice, each eventually becoming rooms unto themselves. Wear perfumes and adopt the swampy greens of the Bassin d’Apollon as your state of mind. Hear our present intuitions fondling for ever darker blues and reds? Ignore those. Green and granite were the only colors to exteriorize themselves from this place, cradling us the same as anywhere else, only different. Groan, we several sainted with a role in History, because now that’s all we know how to do."

1632 c/o Scott Riley Irvine

The Divine Hand, on the Arm Longer than the Other

The Wrist

Today is dedicated to the hand, its tendons, the pulp gleaned from the forearm.

Dr. Tulp has discreetly concealed the parts he had severed in sessions prior. The cadaver appears newly deceased, except that it has no neck. One arm is longer than the other. The chest is distended and swollen, the color of fly-blown light. Men in black cloaks jostle with one another for a seat as the Vesalius of Amsterdam takes his place at the center of the room. The event begins as an uproarious one. Tulp calms them to a low murmur. Their syncopated breath begins to form tides, like waves tethered to the moon’s pull.

Curling about his stature.

This is a ritual. This is Holland’s bloody church.

Tulp is dizzy from the smell, the cadaver nearing five days old. They leave it beneath several blankets in a back alleyway. The cold has kept rot from gutting what we need of it. The armored tones of an organ fledge the auditorium with deep, brown plumage. The doctor excuses himself from the opening prayer. He ignores the whispered offers of company. He escapes down hallways receding infinitely.

A student has left parchment scattered in the atrium. On them are sketches of Tulp performing surgery. Extracting organs. Striking poses during lectures he wished now that he hadn’t. And the skeletal outlines of his associates, his colleagues, drawn deeper and with darker shades, mouths frothing in his shadow, vultures perched around the cadaver. Tulp licks the creases for the taste of dead skin cells. Tulp folds the parchment into tiny squares. He wants to give them to a professional artist. He wants to burn them in his garden with the portrait of his father.

Tulp has returned, visibly shaken. Tulp has become conscious of his posture. He allows each of his movements several minutes longer. He buttons his gaze sidelong to the angle in which he had been drawn. The artist is among them, he thinks. Tulp’s face is among his pages. The cadaver’s broad feet. The men’s reticella collars, like wilted flowers on the operating floor.


The Elbow

We believe in redemption. Good born from the bad. The hanged man is allowing God's fluency in engineering to be revealed to us. It comes in wet ribbons from out of his mouth.

We are told the hands are God’s greatest of gifts. Great tact has been taken to present them as such. The cadaver’s hands were carefully manicured, given a thin coat of makeup, rosied around the knuckles. We had witnessed the cadaver’s execution. We knew him to be loud. An admirer of young girls. He fell from the gallows so that he may be consecrated by the scalpel.

We have seen his chest splintered into two halves. We praised our Lord for giving us symmetry. We have seen his neck part so easily from the torso. We praised our Lord for our fragility.

I’m a message from the brain. I send it here. His finger moves like so.

There is only the sound of a collective scratching of silverpoint to collagen. Unlit patches painted across the outer circumference of the auditorium. By understanding the body, we understand Him. We fasten ourselves to the bowing of the radial artery at the elbow. We imbibe ourselves with the protein of its wiring. The caustic sheen of the musculature ruptures with unbound intricacies. We don’t understand what Tulp is saying. We understand completely. We glorify him who glorifies our God, and in glorifying the body that allows him the organs, the blood, the dark purple hues beneath the flesh – we glorify ourselves.