The Double Refuge 🎲 Almost Existential
Everything’s on the Table
Adam and Evil - Heretics of Science - Body of Knowledge - Forbidden Books
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Adam and Evil
Having thus
fully decorticated The Word
there was little left to say on the
slippery subject of Eternal Truth
which started to look like a casket
or thin oval theatre in Padua, Italy
where stems popped from sockets
and the clear skin was drawn back
with a swift, meticulous precision
beneath the necromantic gazes
of the heretic priests
16th C. anatomy theatre in Padua (photo by Kalibos, Italian Wikipedia)
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Heretics of Science
There, in the northern cities of Italy
far enough from the chimes of old Saint Peter's
Mondino de Luzzi and the other heretics of science
conducted their examinations on the squat human body
which lay naked, without so much as an apple leaf
in the wooden chambers of the Renaissance
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Body of Knowledge
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The game of sex
and knowledge was afoot:
the head was exposed to the air
as flesh turned inside out
and now knew itself
and its vesicles
and its muscles
that thrust up
in an endless
base raw drive
of fornication
and deviation
and replication
of its seedling nature amid the grass
of the wide world and its forbidden knowledge
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Forbidden Books
The Index of Forbidden Books was forbidden in the bright theatres
of Bologna and Padua; lit on its own pyre, on its own funeral altar
on which, to his great distress, Pope Prohibitus the Sixth
saw the Snake
with venomous fang
who once bit the ankle
of each clay-footed priest
the ancient enemy
with carbunckles for eyes
now circling on the table
and worming his way up each vein
kidney, liver, philosophy, and part
toward the pulsing red cylinders
of Darwin, Crick, Einstein, and Sartre
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Next: In the Shadow of Borges