Ron Healy lives in the woods near Sleeping Bear Dunes (Empire, Michigan, USA) near Lake Michigan. He is retired, having worked at a variety of jobs ranging from pulpwood cutter to academic librarian, his last job. He discovered poetry as a child in the fifties, published in little magazines in the eighties, stopped submitting (but not writing) for several decades, recently started again, and has read poems in the last couple of years at (and was published by) Poets’ Night Out in Traverse City. He expects that this current writing and submitting phase will last the rest of his life. This particular piece of writing started as a poem but turned into a story.
“Old People from Texas eat spiders” (head bones).
“Virgil Can Not Make My Pet Zebra Laugh” (facial bones).
In high school biology I tried to memorize all the bones in the human body. If the teacher called on you and you could recite some bone systems (cranium, wrist, shoulder, etc.), you’d get extra credit. I could remember some because of their catchy mnemonics, but too often I was thoroughly distracted by the lovely Suzette L _____, who sat in front of me, whose entire body, from head to toe, I will never forget. Who frequently turned back to whisper to the girl sitting next to me, revealing her enchanting profile. Ah, those lovely bones: zygomatic (cheek); mandible (jaw); and inferior nasal concha, palatine, and vomeronasal cartilage (nose). And more: the bright blue eyes (framed by the nasal, lacrimal, and zygomatic bones), the blond curls (undergirded by six or seven of the cranial bones), the captivating smile (mandible, maxilla, plus a bunch of muscles). And when at the end of the class she stood and gathered her books in the basket of her arms, forcing a sumptuous amplitude forward…all bones were forgotten in that splendid moment.
“The anus is nothing, it’s just a hole!” Thus, several years later in the large lecture classroom, my Biology 101 prof as he concludes a didactic journey through the human alimentary canal.
And a querulous student voice: “Do we have to poke holes in those poor frogs? I don’t have the heart for it.” And the prof: “Three things: Number 1: It’s called pithing. You pith frogs.” Scattered titters through the lecture hall.
I hear a whisper from several rows behind me: “Did you know that they piss when they’re pithed?”
Another whispers: “I guess it really piths them off.” Localized suppressed laughter.
Disgusted look on the prof’s face. “You have something to share back there? No? All right. Number 2: Yes, you do have to pith frogs. Or would you rather work with cadavers?” Silence except for a few groans. “Number 3: The heart is not the seat of emotions. It’s here in the brain”—tapping his head — where all thoughts and feelings originate. Get this! The Mesopotamians thought it was the liver!” Here he slaps the right side of his besuited belly, distaste on his face, as if he would spit were he not in the lecture hall. “Heart, liver, whatever. That’s not science! That’s nonsense! That’s just poetry!” He pauses, clears his throat. Smiles condescendingly. “And speaking of brains and hearts: The octopus has nine of one and three of the other. (I’ll leave it to you to find out which is which.) We humans somehow get by with only one of each. Furthermore, the octopus, like the banana, has no bones.” Puzzled looks throughout the lecture hall. “The octopus makes do with just cartilage. This allows it to squeeze through the tiniest spaces, unlike the great escape artist Houdini, whose many bones severely limited his abilities.” Pauses. Continues to smile condescendingly. “My next lecture is on the human skeleton. Who can tell me how many bones are in the body of a fully grown human? (Which you may assume yourselves to be.)”
A few voices (mine included): “206!”
“Good. Some of you have been reading ahead in your textbooks. However, some consider the sternum to be three bones, which, scholars”—gesturing at the class—”would make a total of how many?
A chorus of “209!”
From the back of the room a bold dissenting voice: “208!”
“Exactly!” says the prof. “Stand up!” The student stands up. “A true scholar! A for the day! A+! The rest of you…”(sarcastically) “scholars: Do the math! Class dismissed!”
Two weeks later, in a lab session on the circulatory system, we are instructed to team up with the person to our right and take each other’s pulse. I’m in seat three of six in the row and to my right in seat four — Thank you, Jesus! — is a girl who could be Suzette L.’s better-looking cousin. She takes hold of my wrist in a practiced way (sending a chill down my spine), looks at her watch, and releases my wrist after only fifteen seconds. “Twenty-two. You have a piano pulse,” she says.
“Wait! You only took if for fifteen seconds. And what’s a ‘piano pulse’?”
“Do the math. I’m studying to be a nurse. Fifteen seconds is all I need. Is your pulse always that rapid?”
“Only when you take it,” I say, amazed at my own glibness. I take hold of her wrist, placing my thumb underneath and my middle finger on what I have recently learned is her radial artery. She flexes her wrist slightly as I grasp it.
“Is that your scaphoid I feel with my thumb?”
“I don’t know. You aren’t counting.”
“I used to know all eight bones of the human wrist. Now all I know is the mnemonic.”
I whisper it in her ear. She colors, snatches her hand back, and turns away from me.
“What’s going on there?” the lab instructor, a grad student, says.
“I goofed. I didn’t get her pulse.”
“Did she get yours?”
“Yes!” she says. “Eighty-eight too many!”
Puzzled, the instructor cocks his head. “Well, never mind. Let’s move along. Get together with your lab groups. We’re going to look at some blood.”
“Take some of his,” she says. “I think he’s got too much.”
Later, after my English class, which is devoted to an attempt to define poetry, I linger in the hall with the prof. I tell him about the mnemonic for the wrist bones and my gaucherie with the girl in biology lab.
“You whispered that in her ear?” he says.” You devil you!”
I tell him I think it’s odd that I can remember the mnemonic but only one bone, the scaphoid, which is represented by the first word of the mnemonic. And I tell him about the biology prof’s equation of poetry with nonsense. He is appropriately indignant.
“See this?” he says. He wags his finger in my face. “This is how I use my wrist to respond to your biology prof. Who cares what the wrist bones are called! Now, say it again, the mnemonic.” I say it again. He laughs. “That scans nicely. After the initial monosyllable it’s trochaic. Say again.”
Some lovers try positions that they cannot handle.
“You know why you remember that?” he says. “Because it’s poetry.”
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