Frederick Ruysch, the great embalmer, could fill all the veins and arteries, 
none ruptured, before his solution hardened.                  	 Finders, Keepers

So expert, finally, at perfecting 
Preservation, Ruysch worked with capillaries,
With filling the fine vessels of the face
So well these infants’ heads in bottles float
Eyes open, as if surface still mattered.
Here, in this jar, an arm rising from lace
To grip an eye socket centuries old.
Here, a skull vented for a view of the brain.
Here, the small skeleton which holds a mayfly
To remind us of transience those mornings
When the wunderkammer of sickness takes
All the available space with the keepsakes
Of pain, the curios for fever, and
The repeated mementoes of wheezing.

In this museum in which we love ourselves,
The dispassionate fetus will not break
Its stare. Severed at the neck, we know, yet
Ruysch’s daughter sewed the lace for its throat,
Selected beads; and sometimes she helped him clothe
His allegorical tableaux, fetal
Skeletons walking and weeping and playing
The violin with a dried-artery bow.

Geology of kidney stones, botany
Of blood vessels and lungs, intestine snakes
(Though the wonder is we need these warnings)
Which slither up from the fields to wrap these bones—
I’ve listened to “possible mass” after
One of those landscape kidney stones doubled
Me down to emergency. I’ve posed for
Tableaux with CAT-Scan and seen myself exposed
On the bulletin board for death, so many
Patients waiting in those subdivided rooms
We could have formed our own tableaux for fear,
A full kunstkammer where the conditions
Of our bodies could have been curated
To display the memory absolutions.

Whatever Ruysch is saying now, these rooms are
Weaving me inside. In the hypothesis
Of the Stendahl Syndrome, some tourists grow
Giddy after art.  Their pulse accelerates.
They sweat and faint, or hallucinate, some
Of them depressed, some euphoric, some of them
Omnipotent in their hearts, though so many
Of these displays have been lost I can only
Trace the outline of every suspect organ
I can locate, running my fingers along
The perimeter of the liver to feel
For exactly what I never want to find.
Although as soon as I think this, I say
Of course not, how silly, like the doctor
Who, when I insisted I could distinguish
One kidney heavier than the other,
Shook his head sadly and said “impossible.”