Anna Swir / Large Intestine

“Nude Woman Charcoal Study 56”
 by Ashvin HarrisoN

Large Intestine

BY ANNA SWIR
Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan

Look in the mirror. Let us both look.

Here is my naked body.

Apparently you like it,

I have no reason to.

Who bound us, me and my body?

Why must I die

together with it?

I have the right to know where the borderline

between us is drawn.

Where am I, I, I myself.

Belly, am I in the belly? In the intestines?

In the hollow of the sex? In a toe?

Apparently in the brain. I do not see it.

Take my brain out of my skull. I have the right

to see myself. Don’t laugh.

That’s macabre, you say.

It’s not me who made

my body.

I wear the used rags of my family,

an alien brain, fruit of chance, hair

after my grandmother, the nose

glued together from a few dead noses.

What do I have in common with all that?

What do I have in common with you, who like

my knee, what is my knee to me?

Surely

I would have chosen a different model.

I will leave both of you here,

my knee and you.

Don’t make a wry face, I will leave you all my body

to play with.

And I will go.

There is no place for me here,

in this blind darkness waiting for

corruption.

I will run out, I will race

away from myself.

I will look for myself

running

like crazy

till my last breath.

One must hurry

before death comes. For by then

like a dog jerked by its chain

I will have to return

into this stridently suffering body.

To go through the last

most strident ceremony of the body.

Defeated by the body,

slowly annihilated because of the body

I will become kidney failure

or the gangrene of the large intestine.

And I will expire in shame.

And the universe will expire with me,

reduced as it is

to a kidney failure

and the gangrene of the large intestine.

Talking to My Body (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996)