On Marianne Boruch's "Cadaver, Speak"

There's an interesting outside viewpoint in this poem. Yes - it's in the point of view of one of the cadavers in the lab - but the ending presents an unexpected twist.

"Past tense of me, by the way, is she, a woman who lived," Boruch writes.

I read JM Coetzee's Disgrace last weekend and the concept of the soul stuck with me. The main character in Disgrace at one point mentions that Descartes (In Discourse on The Method) claimed that dogs' souls die with their bodies while the souls of humans live on. In Boruch's poem, the cadaver is separated from the previous owner of itself. Thus, the dead body is the present while she who lived in the body is the past. This is to suggest that the soul of the cadaver is somewhere else, where ever the 'she' is. Though the poem never asks, "Where is she?" I think that question is implied.

I think that giving a dead body a voice undeniably brings up the question of the soul: Is it eternal? If the soul is the mind as Descartes suggested, then does it die with the body?

Aside for these unanswerable yet thought-provoking questions the poem brings up, there is a distortion of emotion through language in this poem.

Consider the lines:

"Not a head,
a skull. Not an eye, an orbit"

The depersonalized words create a feeling of emotional distance. When we see that the med students refer to the eye as an orbit, we see their attempt to distance their consciences from the gruesome acts they're committing. They're using science and terminology to justify dissecting another human body. There are other lines throughout that exemplify this theme without making it so obvious by explaining it in the text. For example, these lines:

"I'm sorry to me
when her knife flashes wrong. I'm sorry,
so sweetly."

The juxtaposition between the word "knife" sandwiched between the two "sorries" is clearly intentional. It humanizes the cadavers while the med students attempt to dehumanize them. Then, ending with the word "sweetly" cuts deep. It shows the helplessness of the cadaver, victimizing and sensitizing her. Simple syntax and diction choices can evoke so much emotion, and I think Boruch masters the two in her poem "Cadaver, Speak."