1 <br />The day she visited the dissecting room <br />They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey, <br />Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume <br />Of the death vats clung to them; <br />The white-smocked boys started working. <br />The head of his cadaver had caved in, <br />And she could scarcely make out anything <br />In that rubble of skull plates and old leather. <br />A sallow piece of string held it together. <br /> <br />In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow. <br />He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom. <br /> <br />2 <br />In Brueghel's panorama of smoke and slaughter <br />Two people only are blind to the carrion army: <br />He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin <br />Skirts, sings in the direction <br />Of her bare shoulder, while she bends, <br />Finger a leaflet of music, over him, <br />Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands <br />Of the death's-head shadowing their song. <br />These Flemish lovers flourish;not for long. <br />Yet desolation, stalled in paint, spares the little country <br />Foolish, delicate, in the lower right hand corner<br /><br />Sylvia Plath<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/two-views-of-a-cadaver-room/
