Now, Now

The Wind Blows My Dictionary Open to “man”

31 The Wind Blows My Dictionary Open to “man” Only it’s not the definition—which casts off boldly: Bipedal primate mammal . . . bright skiff on the epic sea— but the illustrations on the facing page that stop me: Homo sapiens sapiens: Three Views. Fig. 1 stands contrapposto, robed in muscles, each with its numbered dart. Flayed and pierced, he looks like a genial martyr, left arm gesturing toward his posterior view (Fig. 2), as if to say to the reader, who looks down from above, “See, I am just as handsome from the back!” I run my finger up the length of him, from the taut lyre-string of the Achilles, to the Long Adductor of the thigh, to the Superior Gracilis with its chaste omission, but he doesn’t turn. He is gazing over his right shoulder, into the orbital sockets of his skeleton self (Fig. 3), two gentlemen of the world met here by chance, one leaving the party just as this other, his late friend, is coming in. He is, you can tell, a man of refined tastes, left Ilium raised slightly, prehensile foot forward—a trim accountant distinguished by a notable development of the brain and resultant capacity for abstract thought. Time’s man, his spine’s a dry mast, his limbs, freed shrouds that fixed him once between the earth and heaven. What does he care now for the wind 32 that stirs the empty hold where the heart lived, though he recalls how, just yesterday, it whistled through his numbered days, filling them like sails. ...