On Thumbing Through Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation
And what of the bird-headed dwarfs
On page 657, the naked boy
and girl in a bleak light
on a shameless table, propped up
side by side by a single hand,
by a thumb and finger?
What of the boy’s chest, or the girl’s,
no wider than a deck of cards,
each face no longer than a thumb?
What of the normal eyes
made huge by the shrunken
features? Or the wick-
like legs they cannot
straighten, the twisted arms,
the smile as sweet as any
that only the girl
is smiling, still too young
to get it, as she holds her arms up
high as if for an embrace
and not because she had been told to
for the picture for the text book
so we can see them better,
smiling as if pretending so
could made it so,
while the older boy, who gets it,
his mouth like crimped thread,
grimacing, as he looks away,
won’t look into the camera—
looking away as from
a small unpleasantness
he grudgingly gives in to
for his own good
though he can’t see how
or why, the helpless
rageful dignity of looking
elsewhere, as if it were
the body only, and not
him caught naked
there on page 657
of the 1000 page book,
unhoused, unhouseled
on a metal table, in the blameless
wrong of a design he gets,
he gets it, if not all the time
and everywhere, then there
and then, when the camera flashes
fixing him inside the isn’t
of what everyone else is,
which is why he isn’t
smiling like his sister, no,
not now, not here, not
even if asked to, he won’t
be like the other smiling
children in the book,
who smile like children
even while being spit
out on the page by what
beyond it and outside
the book is deeply
drinking all the others in.
