The Body in Two Parts: One—Growth and Two—Death

Sarah Cross

Published online: 27 June 2008# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008

The body in two parts

One: growth

The mysteries of the body have been a timeless motivator of human inquiry, captivatinganatomists, artists, engineers, lovers, musicians, parents, physicists, poets, students, andsurgeons alike. Gautier D’Agoty’s “The Flayed Angel,” a woman with her backmusculature exposed, looking at us over her shoulder, is but one example of theintersection of science and art. Indeed, the human body may be the common origin of bothdisciplines. Captivating our creative curiosity, the five works in this first collection ofpoems on the body all touch on the mystery of the body’s growth or change. From womb tograve, the “intricate gates” of our bodies open and close as we move through the world.Despite our individuality, our common origins unite us.

Michael Anasara’s “At Nineteen Weeks” parallels our common journey in the wombwith another commonality, “what/remains in the end.” This poem touches on the humanbody as a product of evolution and is a commentary on the unmistakable parallel betweenbirth and death. It is a look into the mostly unknowable “swirled cosmos” of the womb viathe “black/grain and flecked white” of ultrasound and is a grandfather’s first ode to his yet-unborn grandchild.

Birth and evolution are common ways to think of the growth of the human body. Thebody in “Sleep,” by Jeffery Bean, however, has rings—“A thin one’s a dry year,/a fat one’sa green year” and “the good table of your bones” remind us that our physical existence isnot that different from other living things. In “Sleep” our bones can be turned into mud andbirds, and our moods can be like trees.

Relationships can be charted by the change and growth of bodies. Stephen Rose’s“Historian of Your Body” mourns the dissolution of a partnership through “the scar/thatgrins upon your stomach” and “the first white hairs at your temples.” The narrator observesthese physical changes as correlates to events in the history of this relationship.

J Med Humanit (2008) 29:189–202DOI 10.1007/s10912-008-9060-6

S. Cross (*)Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven, CT, USAe-mail: sarahcross@alum.swarthmore.edu

Some growth of the body is occult. The violence of “Torn heads in her hands/and a star-nosed mole in the cat’s/soft mouth” in “On Her Knees in the Lettuce Bed” by LeslieWilliams cannot overshadow the true deadly contender in the poem: “the knot/inside herovary’s purple flesh.”

Of course as the body changes with age, it brings the mind with it. Elizabeth Dickhut’s“In The Nursing Home” reminds us that even when the brain may fail at its normalcommunication the body is able to speak in subtler ways: “you look at her/as your fingerscurl/around hers, sensing/this is more/than a stranger’s love.” This common journey alongdifferent paths to the same end unites us.

Science’s body, however physical, is inseparable from what art reminds us of: the spirit.The body holds our love, our amazement, moods, and ultimately our end. The five poemsin this collection each touch on the growth and change of the body—and thereby life—fromwomb to old age.

At 19 Weeks

Each chinked linkin the precise, formedfishbone/backbone,each particular withina swirled cosmos of blackgrain and flecked white,a pear curve delineatedwithin a light-coned basket,a scrap of continuation,marker of the long marchaway from the dorsal.Already prehensile hand;fingers that lightly flutter,larger-than-likely head,skull unfleshed as ifto remind us of whatremains in the end.Now the impossible beautyof possibility, taking shapefaster, the body’s inevitablegates and alleys, foot flex,blood bloom, even grief.

—Michael Anasara

Commentary on “At 19 Weeks”

As I was approaching 60 last fall, my eldest daughter brought us the delicious news that shewas pregnant. At 19 weeks, she sent along the ultrasound prints. And then several monthslater, I was privileged to go with her and her husband to their ultrasound session.

The grainy black and white pictures of the person to be, deep in her womb, were thrillingand moving. They made me ponder what was actually occurring inside my daughter’sbody—and to contemplate the growth of this new, soon to be independent body. The more I

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studied the pictures, the clarity of shape within the cone of light, the more moved I was. Iwanted to find a way to describe the detail of the pictures and to capture in words all thatwas contained in that warm universe of her womb.

I, of course, was drawn to the most startling and visible details—the very clearly definedbackbone of the fetus, the fingers already capable of moving and the head that seemed toolarge and very skull like. I kept thinking about the head and that lead me to skulls and that ledme to re-read Hamlet, where once again I was startled to find amazing phrases—“the quickand the dead,” and “gates and alleys of the body.”

I hoped to write about the body growing and the body holding this new life. I wanted tocapture the universe of possibility and the incredible rapidity of development going on inthe womb over the 9 months as glimpsed in the black and white prints of the ultrasound.And in some small way, I wanted to capture the entire experience of our life of and in thebody.

Now the ultrasound pictures have given way to an amazing baby, Cyrus, who I am sure willbe the inspiration for future poems and already is the cause of much delight and amazement.

Sleep

is the green shade in youyou press up to.

Lay down your book,this body, thick loaf, your slow work.

The thrumming dank woodof your chest, moods

like rings expanding there.A thin one’s a dry year,

a fat one’s a green year.The knuckles of your wants rap your

hard surface, words finger your bark.Faces from your childhood spray like smoke

from your brain’s saw.This is what you saw:

the good table of your boneshauled down to the lawn,

pulped, spread like seedsto turn into mud and birds.

You are in the bed’s mouth. It will swallow.You are the bed’s bird. Its swallow.

—Jeffery Bean

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Commentary on “Sleep”

“Hypnogogia” is that bizarre and wonderful state between wakefulness and sleep, wakingconsciousness and dreams. As a poet, I am interested in this condition because of the potentimages it conjures: swooping or buzzing sounds, visions of blue sparks, diamond-shapedpatterns, flashes of colorful light. Best of all, it calls up strange fragments of language, shortsentences spoken with authority (in the mind) that ultimately make no sense. Or, rather,they make emotional sense as opposed to logical sense.

In the poem “Sleep,” I explore the hypnogogic state. The term is derived from the Greekwords hupnos (sleep) and agogos (leading). I like to think of agogos in the sense of“leader” or “guide” because I sense an “other,” some distant presence that speaks to me, inthose hallucinatory moments before sleep. So, for the poem, I chose the second personpoint of view, and I created two distinct speakers: that of the non-italicized lines, whichdescribe the condition of “you,” the addressee, and the images that appear to him; and thatof the italicized lines, which are spoken in the voice of that “other,” the voice that theaddressee’s mind, in hypnogogia, hears. And, just as I tend to “think” in metaphors andimages when I’m on the brink of sleep, so in the poem I present ideas through metaphor.

Did I write this poem partly in or near a state of hypnogogia? No. Well, yes and no—thelast couplet, or something like it, came to me just before sleep. I managed to wake upenough to jot down those words, but I didn’t write the poem until the next morning. Thatcouplet makes one of those statements that defy logical explanation; it comes at the point inthe poem when the addressee moves past hypnogogia and into dream.

Historian of Your Body

I am a historian of your body.The fine lines that run the sides of your breasts;I can tell which came with our last child.My fingers have traced the scarthat grins upon your stomach.I saw it happen—the blood, the child up out of youlike a phoenix, but you were not destroyed.

Lying by your side after love, youpointing out the first white hairs at your temples.I counted them but now cannot remembertheir number. Things are different now;you’ve closed your book on a shelf beyondmy reach. Others may find a way to study there:men able to reach the shelf, and findthe subject wondrous.

You may find them nubile, their storiesand touch fresh, their fingers blind pilgrimstracing your lines, the scar on your stomach,new and holy country to discover.Even the white roots of your hair are hidden.

I am simply the historian, and what for them is a conquestis for me the homeland whose tales I can only record.

—Steve Rose

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Commentary on “Historian of Your Body”

This poem came about for reasons that are pretty obvious—the loss of a spouse toseparation and later, divorce. Our 20-year relationship ended for a number of reasons andno reason at all. As is true with many marriages that die with a child still at home, my ex-spouse and I remained in the same house but different rooms for some time, although weknew what was coming. This poem was written during that time.

Odd how one wallows in memory once someone who has become as familiar as coldcereal now sleeps in another bed 30 eternal feet away. There is very little invention inthe first half of this poem; the scar from her Caesaran of our youngest is very real, aswas counting the gray hairs at her temple. As one ages, pillow talk takes interestingturns.

The metaphor of her being a closed book, besides being an image extending throughoutthe first half of that stanza, also has personal meaning. We both were and are bookworms.As for other men handling that book, being introduced to a new read, so to speak, that wasmy way of dealing with the fact that she would be dating other men, but also my way ofrespecting a person I had loved for two decades. The last couplet seals the inevitable, butgives the narrator a place to rest and a bit of dignity to deal with the loss.

I am a doctor, but in the academic sense. I keep my hand in the poetry writing business,but make my living in teaching teachers in a small Midwestern college. My ex-wife and Iare both happily remarried and the child who lived through the divorce recently graduatedfrom college. We all made it.

On Her Knees in the Lettuce Bed

Torn heads in her handsand a star-nosed mole in the cat’s

soft mouth, a mixed surrender.How long has it been here, this earth

that just as soon would be at the bottomof the sea, black and glinting with mineral

possibility? How many years the knotinside her ovary’s purple flesh?

—Leslie Williams

Commentary on “On Her Knees in the Lettuce Bed”

This poem used to be called “The Ropes.” It started with two images: an ovary as “a tinyeggplant, cut loose and waving/on its thready stem,” and the beauty of a woman working ina garden, her “exquisite ropy neck taking the sun.” She is on her knees, both because thework requires it and because it is an attitude of prayer.

Only later did I recognize the pun in the first image, which had been so visual. Theovary as an egg-plant; i.e., “planted” with eggs. I have always been amazed that femaleinfants are born with the seeds of future lives already inside them, and that some of thefruits we eat are the ripened ovaries of the vegetable kingdom.

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The poem also used to be longer. Though this line did not remain, I like to think itsshadow lingers: “You could go/so easily, swept off by a cartoon Wind whose/curlicuedbreath bursts clouds.” I wanted to bring animal, vegetable and mineral together in onepoem with their surprising and shared vulnerability. All of us are on the ropes in one wayor another.

In the Nursing Home

Mother speaks to youin loud, slow words,and you respondwith nothingbut pursed lipsand small nods.You do not recognize us:daughter and granddaughter.We are silly strangersbegging you to playchildish games of Go Fish!and Old Maid.

I know we must existsomewherein the deep foldsof memory. There we aregrabbing cattails from the pond’s edge,snapping peas under the shadeof a willow tree, or holdingimpromptu racesin a stretch of grass.

At night, I wonderwhat sounds you hearechoing acrossthe sunken valleys of time:the syncopated rhythmof the tractor’s engine,the low rumble of cornrolling off the wagon,the hard stomp of small feetover a linoleum floor.

When we move to leave you,mother grabs your hands,which have sat foldedand motionlessthrough the afternoon,and for the first time,you look at her

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as your fingers curlaround hers, sensingthis is morethan a stranger’s love.

—Elizabeth Dickhut

Commentary on “In The Nursing Home”

In the mid-1990s, my grandmother, Margaret Fleck, was diagnosed with dementia. At first,it did not seem to have a huge impact on her life. She sometimes forgot to run errands,occasionally misplaced everyday items, or repeated simple instructions to her grand-children. But when her husband of 50 years passed away, her dementia became morepronounced. Her doctors believed that she was experiencing the early stages of Alzheimer’sDisease.

Over the next decade, we witnessed the gradual deterioration of Margaret’s memory andintellectual abilities. My grandmother, once a strong, hardworking woman, eventually hadto have everything in her life labeled. Pictures of her husband, her six children, and her 12grandchildren were labeled. Instructions on how to bathe herself were taped to thebathroom mirror. Directions on how to use simple kitchen appliances were placed on thecounter. For a woman who spent much of her life in a kitchen, this was difficult to face notonly for her, but for all of us.

“In the Nursing Home” reflects on the final stages of the disease when Margaret wasoften quiet and unresponsive, seemingly drowning in a pool of sadness that was too deepfor any of us to truly understand. Eventually, my grandmother did not seem to reallyrecognize anyone, especially her children and grandchildren who lived hours away andwere unable to see her on a regular basis. To witness my mother, Margaret’s youngestdaughter, speaking to her “in “loud, slow words” as if she were a child was upsetting. Forcomfort, I chose to believe that my grandmother did remember us somewhere in the depthsof her memory. I believed that while her brain betrayed her, her soul knew us and felt ourpresence as people who loved her and people whom she loved.

The body in two parts

Two: death

This second collection of poems on the body deals with its final mystery: death. A likelycounterpart to the first collection on growth, death motivates creativity no less. In thesepoems death is discussed both as an end, but also as a surprising parallel to life. So sacredwas the body, even in death that its manipulation was long forbidden. Much of what wehave come to know is due to studies of the body after death. Indeed one of the first tasks ofmedical students in their pursuit of the mysteries of life is the dissection of a human being.This collection invites us to embrace the mystery of death and be unafraid.

In “The Green Flash” by Renee Rossi, we are taken to the moments at the end of lifewhen death is hovering and inevitable but not yet arrived; the time that many fear most.Instead of being full of fear, however, these moments are described as the “green flash ofthe sun…before it drops below earth.” This poem likens the arrival of death, the feared

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transition, to happenings as lovely and easy as the setting of the sun, thereby inviting us tobe less frightened of our body’s own natural retreat.

It is a unique opportunity to compare one’s own body to that of a cadaver as CatherineClark-Sayles does in her poem “Unraveling,” which she does both in the past “where Istood comparing dissected cogs of tendon to my hand” and in the present “the little deathsof thyroid, uterus and spine go unmourned.” In this poem, we may embrace the fact that lifeis not without its own deaths and that the two are not mutually exclusive.

“Cadaver” by Steven Ablon is a frank account of the intimate anonymity of a first-yearmedical student’s experiences in the anatomy laboratory where young students in thebeginning of their medical careers explore the intricacies of life through death—a taskmany of us are unprepared for. As the narrator admits to his feelings toward his cadaver,“ligaments lifting from bone, sorrow from time,” the poem is a celebration of thehumanness that remains after death, “[h]er eyes burn pale as formaldehyde sky,” which mayallow students to confront what death really is—the passing of an individual.

Kit Wallach’s “Autopsy” is an imagined personal account of the cataloguing of aloved one’s death. As we are taken through the body we are able to find some answers toevents that have taken place, “[t]hose little gremlin pieces of pills left in your intestines,”but much remains elusive in deciphering both the correspondence left by the deceasedand the body. This poem is a reminder that the body is not wholly transparent. There areanswers we cannot know from a purely physical exploration when what we really seek isthe soul.

“Death in the Mountains” by MC Hyland brings us back to what death truly is—asimple and arguably beautiful universal event. As the landscape changes, “a dimness on therocks & trees,” so does the body, “[s]omeone’s hand clutching the bedsheet, not yours, nolonger yours.” Through these changes, “[y]our mouth dusty inside, bones in your hands toosmall inside the skin” the body is returned through death to the “dirt and far-off rain,”where it may become part of something again.

The Green Flash

You walk in on a woman whose brain won’t fitback into her skull: her frontal lobes cut outto fit this puzzle, to make the pieces fit.There’s a certain violence in holding a woman’s hand

when you know she’s going to die &she doesn’t know your third eye alreadysees the mushroom cloud. That night yousleep in grey woolens, dream you’re

in Antarctica at dusk, seeing the elusivegreen flash of the sun just before it drops belowearth. It must be a place where the air is clearenough for the sun’s camera to take

that instantaneous photo of you child—like on the horizon and not knowing the headis always shaved first before sterileprocedures involving the brain. Only

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wishing you could go back tothat brightness, as when the hair you’dgathered from your brush and placed gently around the yardyou found woven into a bird’s nest the next day.

The last faces she sees must be grainylittle storm clouds passing across her pupils.One of them is yours.The hallways and corridors appear longer this night,

particles of silence and drifting dust motes.As you drive home on the lighted highwayyou meet her once again,flashing past in the anxious cars.

—Renee Rossi

Commentary on “The Green Flash”

When I was a surgical resident, I held the hand of a woman just before she was put to sleep.She died on the operating table from an irreversible brain bleed and the resultant swelling. Thedecision was made to cut out her frontal lobes so the skull could be closed. I remember askingone of the neurosurgery residents how to handle such things because I felt so unpreparedemotionally. He said we could not think about the pathos of this scene until later or we wouldbe incapable of finishing the case. Where were the last conscious thoughts, I wondered?

Later, I was reading Peter Matthiesen’s book, End of the Earth, where he recounted ajourney to one of the most unforgiving and remote lands on earth, Antarctica, and I realizedwe make this journey in our lives every day. He described the experience of seeing theevanescent green flash as the sun sets at the proper angle over a long, uninterruptedstretch of horizon. The image of the green flash is wholly dependent upon the reflectedlight on the retina of the receiver. At that precise moment in the operating room, I wasthe receiver of the green flash. This poem is an attempt to recover that ineffable landscape.In his letters John Keats spoke of “negative capability” where “man is capable of being inuncertainties without reaching after fact or reason.” This poem is also an attempt to live in thatuncertainty.

Unraveling

How do I inhabit this body?Like the sweater from my aunt—enthusiastic, erratic, knitwith color-blind abandon,something else unravelsevery year; it is the wayof bodies, and I am learning

medicine from the insideas if I were the cadaver

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picked apart on that steel tablethirty years ago in Denverwhere I stood comparing dissectedcogs of tendon to my hand.

I am trying to find gratitudefor a body that perseveresas I pull this lumpy flesharound myself more closely—each birthday, the fit less certainas the surgeon takes his bits:polyps, disc and ovaries,nothing critical but all mine.

There are rituals of deathwhen someone diesbut the little deaths of thyroid,uterus and spinego unmourned and no onetells us where to sit,and when to stand,what hymns must be sung.

The child who won’t be born,the foot left numb—small portionsgiven to the gods of decay;I go on,carry in my bones a way of knowinghow fear can wound,and how belief binds upwhat hurts.

—Catherine Clark-Sayles

Commentary on “Unraveling”

Each decade of my life has presented a new way for my body to surprise me: from themystery of genetics—where did my Scotch-Irish ancestors find a Mediterranean anemia?—to intimate education in the gap between benign and malignant and how long the wait forthe pathologist’s report can be. I tell myself that my education in “The Body” has improvedmy skills as a doctor. I am more empathetic, certainly. But I have also developed a warymistrust of the inevitable deteriorations.

I wrote “Unraveling” at a conference called “Writing the Medical Experience” at SarahLawrence College, which was attended by doctors, nurses and people experiencing illness. Ibegan the week thinking of myself as a provider of health care but found my perspectiveshifting. The heat and humidity were oppressive, and I was feeling ill and vulnerable.Because of ongoing problems with blood sugar, I had just started injections of a medicinederived from Gila monster venom, which caused constant queasiness. I was facing a liver

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biopsy the following week. In California my 20-year-old cat was ill, and I was guilty aboutbeing absent. It was my fifty-second birthday.; I was feeling very ancient and sad.

Aging is a passage we all share and there is the expectation that it be borne silently witha minimum of complaint. Many people tell stories about poor health but we are notencouraged to grieve for the parts of ourselves lost to illness and time. The poem was myway of writing through my feelings of loss to some sort of affirmation.

Cadaver

We name her Penelope,patiently waiting everydayfor us without reproach.Her eyes burn paleas formaldehyde sky.

With a scalpel I digamong the ruins in herabdomen, cut open her heart,feel the chambers that pulsedwith passion. The lesson for today

is the toe, ligaments liftingfrom bone, sorrow from time.Her skin is the rubberof my sisters’ baby doll,the thigh I dug with a safety pin

to make her cry. We are young,full of sex, think she was strangled,a prostitute in an alley,Too bloated to tell,I find her pretty.

I look at her full moon breasts,her unblemished oval face,her slender waist. For this hourshe has endless time, endlesssuitors. Her death is endless.

—Steve Ablon

Commentary on “Cadaver”

At the beginning of medical school one of the first and most daunting tasks is beingentrusted with a cadaver for the yearlong anatomy class. In the first year, medical studentsare not entrusted with a live patient. From my practice as a psychoanalyst I have come toknow that many students study medicine because of their fear of death and a wish to learnabout disease and fight death especially on behalf of their loved ones and themselves.

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When students meet the anonymous body that they will cut, tear, mutilate andeventually, discard, they may experience a profound sense of gratitude to this person andconfer an identity upon him or her. At the center of all this is the body, the body in whicheach of us is born and in which we live every second of our lives. Freud said, “[t]he ego isfirst and foremost a body ego.” The body is the yardstick for coping with life.

The most powerful aspects of my cadaver were her nakedness, vulnerability andinvulnerability, her rubbery skin and the overwhelming smell of formaldehyde that seepedlike life and death into my clothes and stung my eyes with tears, tears for the fragility oflife. During the dissections I thought about sex, passion and violence escaping from theendless stillness of the cadaver.

In addition to my practice and teaching, I am writing a fourth collection of poems, whichis about being a doctor, medical education, training and practice.

Autopsy

Instead of goodbye you wrote a letter that said,There are whole worlds inside of me you’ll never know.

Listen, I was there at your autopsy. A woman doctorTook pity on my heaving doorstop shoulders,Let me in and led me to your cold, prone body,Opened gullet like a gutted fish, and I saw it all.

I saw the bear’s mouth of your chest,Ribs parted, lungs like pieces of porous rock, stiff and veinedYour heart, the little fist of it, nestled like a cat on a trampoline,Your arteries branching like forked electricity.

I kept my eyes out for solar systems, but all I got were gallstones.I looked for highways; I found nerves.How sad your liver looked.Those little gremlin pieces of pills left in your intestines.

I looked into your eye sockets while she held your lashes back with a q-tipFor the last time, I saw the flashbulbs inside each iris—I saw your pupils fixed to pencil dots.I saw all the plaque on your teeth from last night.

The way your organs had each bled out a little after death,The way your fingers had curled into stiff quotation marks,As if you hadn’t given up the argument just yet,Hadn’t penned that letter that left out everything.

Through the microscope, your blood looked full, like a good party.The light showed through your cells as if they were windows.There was so much color, inside of you—All your organs like wet laundry.

When she stitched you, I had to resist the urge to reach out andShake the table, so your seams would havePuckered, come out wrong. So you would have leaked.Finally, spilled your guts—

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This is why they don’t let the family in. The doctor took one look at me,Put her hands on my doorstop shoulders, and promisedTo call when it was over—why I had to go back home to your noteAnd our old pictures, to see if, ripping that flat ink of a signatureI might catch a glimpse of what had been my whole world—See if there were really something, hidden, that I had missed.

—Kit Wallach

Commentary on “Autopsy”

After a friend committed suicide, I began to think seriously for the first time about thereality of a body, separate and yet inseparable from the person who “inhabits” it. Does acorpse retain any individuality? What could be more human than the flesh and blood we aremade of? And yet, there is nothing emptier of the hope of the living than a corpse. We donot seem to know how to interact with something that both is and is not the individual wewere so familiar with—something that is both so gone and so present before us.

I am fascinated by the idea of the autopsy. That one can deconstruct a corpse the way noliving being can be deconstructed seems like a bitter irony. And yet what kind ofexplanations could possibly be gleaned that would be important, let alone sufficient, tosomeone who is grieving? My friend’s suicide left me with a lot of questions and exactlyzero answers. This poem was my first attempt to record a transcript of what remains animpossible interrogation of the dead.

Death in the Mountains

It will be like this: first a dimness onthe rocks & trees, like a sash pulled quicklydown over glass. Your mouth dusty inside,bones in your hands too small inside the skin.Summer too high in the sky, your littlehouse dwarfed by the looming sun. The airwill smell of dirt and far-off rain, flowersleft growing outside. Someone’s hand clutchingthe bedsheet, not yours, no longer yours, asthe trees fill up with your bees’ inky buzz.

—MC Hyland

Commentary on “Death in the Mountains”

I have always been interested in the moments when my own body feels foreign: the peculiarlightheadedness brought on by intense exercise or a vigorous hike, the strange, itchy“growing pains” I would feel as I drifted off into sleep in adolescence. These moments, andthe sheer strangeness of embodiment which they point to, are a terrain I find endlesslyfruitful as a writer—a terrain whose awkward and shifting geography I never tire ofattempting to map: the strangeness of aging, of desire, of death, the body and its mysteriousworkings.

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Lacking the tools of scientific analysis for these momentary shocks of embodiment, Iresort to philosophy and literature to try to make sense of them. Julia Kristeva’s Powers ofHorror, is book-length essay, which attempts to make sense of the attraction/repulsion thatcertain (“abject”) bodily wastes create. This passage is similar to what I was thinkingthrough in my poem: “If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I amnot and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border thathas encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled.” “Death in theMountains,” though tied to a specific locale (it was initially inspired by the practice, in thePyrenees, of placing a dot of black ink on every bee in the hives when the beekeeper died),attempts to speak to the profound but common strangeness of that final act of expulsion.

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