Knowing the Whole by Its Parts – “It’s Not a Tent; It’s Not a Tree; Only a Knee, No More.”

A human body is a small thing by universal standards. But living inside one, it can grow to feel enormous — the extent of ourselves, the felt edge of what we know. Barely discernible for what it is as a whole, when we consider the body part by part — especially from each part’s perspective — we sense again, with refreshed excitement, the strangeness of our aggregation.

EYES

Compared:

Borrowed: From Jill Leininger‘s poem “O” — about her friend, an ex-exotic dancer who now works as a professional eye harvester, collecting eyes from recently deceased eye donors for medical use:

[Her work] calls her to the morgue in a lonesome fog. Her job:
exacting eyes from the warmer corpses, retinas
for the day surgeon to restore into others’
cloudy visions. The technique, a click, an incision
through which it seems the dead could be speaking. Tut goes
the suck of their last desire, and she is with them,
sometimes still wearing her slippers.

Another side fact and shudderingly lovely image from Leininger’s eye poem, this time involving the vocal cords:

…The procedure requires
that she detach a man’s eyes by rolling his body
toward her. And if he went with a scream or a groan
in his throat, this dislodges it: the familiar song
of pain and pleasure…

THE KNEE

I first discovered Christian Morgenstern‘s poem “The Knee” (as translated by W. D. Snodgrass) in the wonderfully eclectic collection The Rattle Bag Anthology. It is one of the few poems that I have been able to memorize and consistently retain in its entirety. Perhaps its ability to stay in my mind has something to do with the wholeness in part that the poem’s image contains. The absurd yet brave way the knee roams the world, now apart from its man “overkilled” in war — its loneliness, its solemn grace — makes me appreciate the fate of my own knee in a way I never would have before.

The Knee

There wanders through the world a knee.
It’s just a knee, no more.
It’s not a tent; it’s not a tree;
Only a knee, no more.

There was a man once in a war
Overkilled, killed fatally.
Alone, unhurt, remained the knee
Like a saint’s relics, pure.

Since then it roams the whole world, lonely.
It is a knee now, only.
It’s not a tent; it’s not a tree;
Only a knee, no more.

(Even the sound and look of the word itself, with its Old Norse roots, conveys a sense of both stoicism and blessed silliness. Knee. Knee knee knee.)

BONES

If we could listen in on our bones in conversation, I think it might come close to the coaxing and visionary dialogue overheard in Vasko Popa‘s poem “At the Beginning” (from the series “Bone to Bone” in Homage to the Lame Wolf: Vasko Popa Selected Poems, translated by Charles Simic):

At the Beginning

That’s so much better
We’ve saved ourselves from the flesh

Now we’ll do what we’ll do
Say something

Would you like to be
The backbone of lightning

Say a bit more

What can I say
Hipbone of a storm

Say something else

That’s all I know
Ribs of heaven

We’re nobody’s bones
Say something else

“What can I say / Hipbone of a storm” — indeed!