ROUGH MUSIC, EDINBURGH , 1829

Why shouldn’t Dr. Knox have invited
his painter friend to view the body
of the girl he knew was too fresh
for legitimate death, her “handsome”
limbs and alabaster waist a crime
to cut before at least one brush
could render her unscathed on paper?
Had she been any less an odalisque,
perhaps he wouldn’t have needed to collude
with artists or waste good whiskey
to keep the cream in her hips, her purpled
lips all the more arresting than they’d been
in life. If he’d found her sooner and living
would he have known all this was there
for purchase? Would he have offered
to keep her in dresses and tea for peeks?
In the weeks after Hare had turned
King’s evidence on Burke and the latter’s
convicted corpse was flayed and offered up
to forty thousand pairs of public eyes,
Knox refused to speak. Though by report
she’d been delivered to Surgeons Square
still warm and clutching twopence-halfpenny
someone paid to bed her, they cut her hair
before she cooled, and Mary swam three
months in whiskey before they took her skin
apart to look inside. When the story broke,
an angry mob came after Know with noise,
an opera of whistles, pots and pans,
and tore his effigy to shreds in Newington
outside his house. And if in Mary Paterson
a child had taken root, no one would be the wiser
if Knox had kept the little lyric of it to himself,
scion fathered by the Scottish city’s lust,
gift to men of science, and so also to me,
woman of the new world digging through
old books to resurrect her murdered parts,
to offer her my own rough music, the strange
collusion of imaginary science and real art.



TORSO OF A WOMAN GONE WITH CHILD, 1774

Why Jan van Rymsdyck made two versions
of his drawing for Hunter’s Anatomy
of the human gravid uterus, we can only guess.
The female torso has her dress
peeled upward like her skin, to reveal
the giant egg-shaped uterus
in its nest of shining entrails,
below which a smattering of pubic hair
smudges the upper thighs, and the tops
of her ungartered stockings sag
as if she had just wandered out
of any one of Lautrec’s dance hall scenes
and keeled on the spot. More curious still
is the fact that one of Rymsdyck’s
drawings has an open book between the thighs,
the slim entrance to the world of this woman’s
gravid uterus curtained with a gilt-edged spine,
as if the nether parts were deep in study
of some esoteric subject, as if her reading eyes
were there where her desire once lived.



UP NORTH

I’ve had too much champagne, a sip
of cognac, a few blue hits on the good cigar
handed round at midnight in the blast
of bonfire on the frozen lake,

so we hurry back into our woods, drive
as far as the road is cleared, then toss
the bright plastic sled on the snow
where I lay me down to ride the last

half mile in. Prone, I see no more
than branches clasped above; cold pulls
its stilling finger along my spine,
and I hold my blood against it

to see what will push back. The snow
is deep but light, gives with shush
as I slip through, erase my lover’s tracks.
He stops on hills, shifts his weight,

changes hands on the burning rope.
he’s pulled in everything on sleds before,
wood, water, gear, boxes of wine and meat,
but never a woman, a weight that warms

the track and leaves a long gash of ice.
I brace my heels against the sled’s hard rim,
the snow’s chaff riding in around my thighs.
I know he wants this dark work of hauling me

to see if he can bear my weight, to dream me
as a stone, a corpse, pure sure thing.
And me, I’m not opposed to playing spoil
or chattel, allowing how he has to pull away

and lean against the dark to haul me up
hard against his heels. I let him have
the pleasure of dragging home his woman,
offer up my inert flesh as ballast, balance

against desire’s dogged march into the dark.

From The Resurrection Trade. Copyright 2007 by Leslie Adrienne Miller. All rights reserved.