Today at the college library the students check out armsand legs—towering models of muscles and veinsperched on a stand like a hat rack. The examjust two weeks before Cadaver Day, when they will arrivepale-faced and woozy in my lit class. I will read themKeats and they will think of the vastus medialisand the rectus femoris, and how they looked not strongand red as on the model but brown and shriveled,spoiled like old meat. They will think of the sound of theirblade slicing into a corpse’s leg, of the tibial nerve runninglong and taut like a highway straight down to the ankle,of the precarity of their bodies made only of body.I will tell them that Keats trained as a surgeon beforedonating his body to poetry, how he died just a few yearsolder than them. But their mind will stay lost in the lengthof the leg on the table: how the toes wriggled with a tugon the ribboned tendons, how the toes had nails, howthe nails once grew, how an old woman with a nameonce bent to trim them over a toilet bowl. And nowafter all to feel so temporary, to hear finally the wordswithin the words uttered sacred by the preacher,the teacher, the nurse. Beauty is truth and truth is beauty,but a body on a table is made of parts with namesthat must be known as certainly as Adam knew the namesof the animals, or at least as I know my own—name ofthe body I live in, a body I’ve long thought of offering,so I can teach again in death. But that is not for today.Today, is for hopeful plastic models that snap togetherlike toys. Today they color the arteries red and the veins blue,dreaming of their scrubs and their stethoscopes,strangers to Keats and the plague they’ll soon grapple.Today the answer is not: Someone once kissed this spot, so tenderbehind the knee, but, Gracilis, plantaris, extensor hallucis longus.