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In Full Velvet

When Aristotle dissected the embryos in bird eggs,

he mistook the spinal cord for the heart.

Anaximander of Miletus wrote that the first humans

burst out of the mouths of fish

and that we took form there

and were held prisoners until puberty.

At its root, taxidermy means to arrange skin.

O Love, how precise is any vision?

*

Gut a body and we’re nothing left but pipes whistling in the breeze.

That’s all the cassowary is when you slit her open:

She’s lungs wrapped in dark fur. She’s a full baritone with a soft wattle.

There’s nothing in her casque but soft tissue.

Because it makes me want to turn away,

I watch film footage of scientists

poking through the pink tendons,

the reptilian claw of the euthanized Casuarius.

When they fondle the sweet spot, a talon shoots out and stabs a melon

the same as it would the appendix of a lazy zookeeper.

I had to cover my eyes when they severed the ancestral wing.

*

Before the antlers fall away, here’s what

the taxidermist teaches:

Because the velvet grows onto the hide we have to skin it and cut it,

so nothing rips up and causes damage.

Being cautious that we don’t give it a big yank,

use your knife and just kind of pull gently.

Go on—tap the skin away from the bur.

See we boned it out.

For hard boned deer we usually just kind of

but we can’t do that when it’s in full velvet or it will, you know.

Now we’re going to put a puncture in the tip.

So, we’re not just hitting the one vein.

That’s what we want to see.

*

It’s also true that some whitetails never lose their velvet.

Hunters raise their eyebrows calling them atypical,