Two Views Of A Cadaver Room

1

The day she visited the dissecting room

They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey,

Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume

Of the death vats clung to them;

The white-smocked boys started working.

The head of his cadaver had caved in,

And she could scarcely make out anything

In that rubble of skull plates and old leather.

A sallow piece of string held it together.

In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow.

He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom.

2

In Brueghel's panorama of smoke and slaughter

Two people only are blind to the carrion army:

He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin

Skirts, sings in the direction

Of her bare shoulder, while she bends,

Finger a leaflet of music, over him,

Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands

Of the death's-head shadowing their song.

These Flemish lovers flourish;not for long.

Yet desolation, stalled in paint, spares the little country

Foolish, delicate, in the lower right hand corner