Body Worlds, and: The Best Moment of My Life

Body Worlds

It's Happy Easter; but the dead look sad,mad, pensive, shocked out of their wits,as befits those who've risen not to heavenbut a museum, their plastinated bodies near-

immortal, but still dead. We viewers lookpious but sick, as if the communion hosttastes like real meat. We goggle like nunswho've never seen ourselves naked. "No!

I couldn't look like that," our faces say,faced with a man-shaped mass of red, root-branching veins—with cross-sections of a boyso fat his own weight squashed his heart.

I poker-face through tubercular lesions,cirrhosis, black-lung, cancer of the everything.But why, although he flays and flaresevery muscle, organ, bone, and even poses

one skeleton with nerves danglinglike puppet strings, does Gunther von Hagens,the Brain behind Body Worlds, leave the gray,spigot-penises whole, testicles hanging

like bolos ripe to drag some pampas squawkerto the dust? Why, oh why, must he leavethe vulvas lodged like fluttery gray leechesbeneath skeletal hips, the clitoris cowering

under leather robes fuzzed with whitehairs that declare these were old ladies— mothers, maybe, who sat for eighty years,thighs crossed modestly which now are porno-

splayed? How many desperate days have Ichased these scraps of jerky, my bolos swingingto defy what, once I'm down, won't everlet me rise?

The Best Moment of My Life

may have been five minutes ago, warm air shurringthrough vents above the bed, wife crunching Corn Flakes

in the kitchen, son asleep, an ache in my left ankleadding just the twinge of pain Art needs to be perfect.

Maybe it's now, as I press arms above my head—stretch, groan, then do a slow-motion frog-kick

underneath my smooth-as-shave-cream sheets.It could have been the time I leaned back in my swing,

and the sky became green grass-spears,while a sky-blue earth took shape under my feet—

or when, with Julie on her balcony, I played Romeountil an orange fire-plug tackled me, making her laugh,

then mouth, "I love you" as the night, except for onecricket, went still. But what can beat right now,

my bare feet sliding to the floor, legs tighteningto hold me as I pull the blinds, and they squeak open

on my son's red dolphin swing, green froth of shrubbery,one yellow rose behind the perfumed ear of spring?