after Florence Wyle

 

Flo was the artist. I managed the blood

and bones, babies slick with afterbirth,

sicknesses like ciphers in the gridwork

hallways of the teaching hospital. She gave birth

on paper and in wood, bronze

when she could get it. I saw her sketching

skeletons the first day of Anatomy—

we were the only girls

in the lecture hall. I had to know

this woman so intent on rendering

jigsaw hands in graphite. While I watched

cells sculpt life from proteins,

she hauled home scrap

from a carpentry shop and made it

move like water under her

fingers. In the hospital cafeteria

she whispered that she had to know

my scapulae’s arch across my back,

the ripple of my ribs, laddered

beneath my breasts, while her hand

lit, light as breath, on my wrist.

She undid and remade me

like a surgeon or a god. I had to pray

my hands steady in the lab

and the delivery room, as I made

my signature in every umbilical

knot. I scrubbed and swaddled,

then hurried to our studio

apartment to nights when she made my hips

echo through a hundred variations

on love and lines, sheets and flesh. And even

though she’s thirty years and five hundred miles

away, I order Toronto gallery catalogues

to trace the familiar shape

of thighs and shoulders, my reinvented body

in which she made her name.