poetry

Notes on a Theme of Horror by Science
by Zenaida French

‘To get the specimens, they froze the bodies of a man and a woman killed in an accident and cut the bodies laterally with a power saw.’

Ripley’s Believe It or Not

The frozen carcasses float
in liquid behind the barrier of glass:
bones, muscle, head, jaw, teeth -
bizarre conglomeration of merciless
Science and blood- thirsty Art, they
look like sections of meat in
the meat section of the supermart.
Is this the quintessence of dust,
half- angel and half- devil, who
walks with his head in the clouds
even as his feet dig deep into the
muck? He is quintessence of
nothing but his own capacity for horror,
mock- hero who slashes his own belly
so he can lay his entrails
on the table, to examine inch
for inch the length of his humanity, and
coming down to the center of his
being, the core of his beastliness
and godhood, discovers there
the link to which the human line
attaches in the downward slide that
is the heritage of Man.

The examination proves there is
no soul in man, not where you can
see into the atoms of his bones,
muscle, eye, teeth and all the parts
that make a man a man. Quintessence
of existence, his secret parts only
affirm his union with the rest of
God’s creations - and God’s mortality.

For what God is there in the bloodless
slice of eye peering out of
sliced cheek through the frozen glass?
You only see the hollow cells
conjoined by a sinister collusion
of chemistry and magic manmade
and undivine. You only see the
poverty of man’s jaded curiosity, his
celebrated creativity turning ‘round
to gobble up its naked tail.

No doubt God saw this gory exhibition
of ingenious inhumanity and fled,
appalled, taking with Him to far-
flung corners of His universe all
the human brilliance and whatever
spark divine.

(The Diliman Review, Vol. 33, no. 6, [Nov. - Dec. 1985])

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