Outside the snow had begun;

the courtyard was a muffle of voices.

In the unlit center of the room, a wheeled

gurney: a cadaver, covered with clear plastic.

Even from a distance I could make out the blue-grey

shape of a man, the dark massed areas of hair

along his upper chest and groin, the long incision

where he'd been opened at the morge.

I didn't want the first nude man I'd see to be dead.

I didn't want to empty him out alone,

piece by piece, his entrails, his heart.

What I wanted was for my friend to arrive,

to take up the instruments and begin the excisions,

the litany or organs.  I would label and bag.

Then together we'd examine the corridors leading

to and from the faulty heart, make precise notes:

where the blood pooled in his body,

what it drained away from.

                                        And so not to look

at the gurney, I studied the instruments: steel calipers,

thin cannulas, the razor-bright edge of scalpels.

How sharp?  I wondered even as the fat pad

of my left thumb opened and blood seeped out.

At the pale blue door labeled Supply in the back of the room,

I put out my good hand and turned the handle.

I heard the latch click.  I heard the hinge complain.

But I was watching my thumb separate

and swell purple like a seam on a plum.

When I did look up, I was inside.

The closet lifted into long shelves

where fetuses, far as the eye could see,

swam in jars, yellowed, curled in on themselves.

The door slammed shut behind me.

I stood there in the crypt-like dark and felt-- what?

Felt the silence entering my ear?  Felt a coordior opening in me?

A coordior like knowing, or the edge of knowing?

Inside me, the seed of the tree of knowledge

took root and began a furious blooming.

I heard him come in.  Heard him call my name.

Heard him mutter to himself; heard him leave again.

I heard a small noise that sounded like mice.

The sleeve of my labcoat was sticky.  I turned in the dark.

I found the handle and opened the door.

I stepped out; I didn't look back.

I closed the blinds and locked the outer door; I turned off

all the lights but one.

                                Then I went to the gurney

and pulled the covering off the man.  I looked

at him, at all of him.  Nothing to distinguish him:

no moles, tattoos, no birthmarks or scars.

Only the incision running from sternum to pubic thicket.

I couldn't tell clearly where the wound ended

and the body began.  I ran the seam of my thumb

along the long opened seam on the man.

"Here is where we meet," I told him,

"Here is where we are the same."

                     -from Flying Out with the Wounded