We swell like crops, then blue
———and toughen to marble
——————till the maggots come.
Ravens start with eye-morsels, swallowing everything.
———They slurp sunsets and children on bikes,
——————then finish with a soprano cackle.
Our bodies are given arenas of trees
———to perform a public symphony,
——————where tubas slump and trombones melt
—————————to a puddle in Tennessee leaves.
There is no harvest here,
———just the tangy scent of fingerprints
——————loosening like skin on a tangerine.
I woke up thinking about the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility. It’s a hilly plot of forest where human bodies are placed, widely spaced, and studied on their journey to oblivion. Photographer Sally Mann wrote about it in Hold Still, her memoir with photographs. She says, “The program endeavors to determine exactly how human bodies decompose, codifying stages of decay and the environmental and situational factors that affect it.” The place is known as the Body Farm, and
photographs from it are haunting and mesmerizing.
The one I find hardest to look at, and therefore the most important, is a picture of a body called White Mary. The angle is strange, so I can’t see her face. She’s turned away from the camera like an angry person in bed. Plus, her skull is sawed in half from an autopsy, making her top look like an overturned bowl of grapes. What strikes me most are her clothes. She’s elegantly wrapped in a once-white shirt with a collar and simple, dark pants. As the skin from her back soggily peels away from her body, it seems the shirt is pushing into it. Her skin and the cotton have meshed to form a new, pink-gray substance that looks stiff yet languid, and strangely alive. I realized how apt the name “Body Farm” is. The anthropologists aren’t watching the evaporation of corpses; they’re watching the creation of death. Death parades in the form of birds and bugs and heat and rain and air. It gently wraps each dead thing in wheezing, musical strands and quietly sets to work on packaging and returning it to the earth.
I wasn’t thinking about the Body Farm last night when I was looking at Atlanta’s skyline. Robby and I had hiked up twelve hot flights of stairs to find that, in order to reach the roof of Ponce City Market, we had to walk back down, buy five dollar purple bracelets, and take the freight elevator up. The stairs were my idea, and I think he almost dumped me. When we finally reached the roof, he pointed to different pockets of the glittery gold city, using his fingertips to draw a rough map of neighborhoods. The skyline stretched elegantly upward from smears of shadows. I wanted to steal it and wear it around my neck.
As I leaned into the cold railing, though, I realized that I was looking at corpses. Somewhere in the city, enveloped in anonymity, were humans who had died. Someone had been shot twelve seconds ago and the news hadn’t yet spread. Someone was swelling in a wooden house, waiting for a neighbor’s dog to pick up their scent. It was a strange thought to have on a chilly, wonder-filled evening, but I pushed at its edges. I wondered how many dead bodies I was
looking at, and guessed nine. But something about that number seemed wildly inaccurate.
Secretly dying in a city brings a slower and eventually interrupted decomposition. Your arena is studded with right angles and draped in artificial light. Death has less creature-teemed grandeur and a more sagging, stagnant exhale. I wonder if it’s cozier, though. I wonder if a little piece of the eardrum jostles awake after death and listens. It hears the light rubs of shoes on cement, the strides of people doing what you once spent a lifetime doing: yawning with the sunrise, laughing at bad jokes and eating microwave dinners and wanting to wear cities on their collarbones.
Death is a mystery that will remain unsolved for certain, but there’s something promising about the physical grace of it. Not the slamming grief it leaves in its wake, but the carefully orchestrated processes that root themselves one after the other into the space a consciousness once inhabited. I’m scared of its ruthless brilliance and sheer inevitability, and in awe of the fact that we all live on a body farm. No matter how many cruel words you say, or rich greens you eat, or ways you choose to love or hate, we all end up with gardens in our stomachs.