Between a rust-rot mailboat and the skeletons of textile factories

               the boy Rodin

floats in the cold shallows of the Aude’s mudflats with the current,

               dodging leeches 
while men do the wash. There are cattle on the sand beneath the wheeze

               of seagulls. Home,

firing the sootcoated kettle, his mother checks him, and in the scalp

               of dark hair one little witch 
marooned, slick and sucking. Mother fumbling at it, a concentration-vein

               like a taproot in her forehead pulsing,

crumbs of light through the window, the smack of spades in the distance.
~~~               ~~~                                    

The first sangsue: immigrant witches at the wound – Gypsy, Jew or Dago combing

               neatly the hair of small

pale children before concussing and boiling them. Or simply bog women

               leech-trafficking in nearby 
villages. In each peasant house, beside purple cabbage and aromatic onions, a glass

               in the window where the beasts

were kept. And second, the Cardinal of Lorraine, drawing undue profit

               from his many offices 
in the corporate body of Christ, conducted the St. Bartholomew’s Day

               massacre. Sanitation

was the Queen’s concern, so the bodies were sold back to families for burial,

               or wheeled in carts over the berry- blackened 
streets to the Seine, weighted and lost to shadows that moved. Years on,

               Parisians still drank from the river

as Gideon’s men, skimming the surface with a bowl, or lapping the water, as

               dogs, who like Jehovah 
are more sanitary than magical, for the springs and streams of Palestine

               abounded in leeches,

which when swallowed stuck in the throat, causing hemorrhaging.  
~~~               ~~~                                    

Not an unbroken piece of furniture in the house, Buñuel kneels at his desk,

               where he put his head

down, the blue capillaries under skin as thin as rice paper, with the hard-focused

               eyes of a man 
one week at the bottom of a lake. Boils, jaundice, grippe; bread and potatoes

               for days. He writes

a friend from the toilet,  “I was so depressed last night that I would have

               put my head in the gas oven, 
if I wasn’t too frightened of the children to go into the kitchen. All of this because

               of a sebaceous cyst in my armpit,

which happily, the doctor has just drained with his little ‘assistants’.” 
~~~               ~~~                          

Da Vinci was so mesmerized by the rippling of leeches propelling themselves

               through water—like Papal

streamers in strong winds—that he sketched them in red chalk, trying to capture

               their motion (the fastest swimmers 
are the hungriest) for his friend Luca Borgia who died having an aneurism under

               a blind moon,

whose body was dragged by French infantryman, still flushed from a bog

               and left, covered 
in small black flags that wilted the man, and when fat on him dropped lazily away. 
~~~               ~~~

Lille’s old executioner-cum-doctor, dwarf-faced and neck-wrinkled

               now sucks the blood

from a street boy’s wrist with professorial reserve while his men keep the kid

               from screaming. 
Years before, ridding the city of its voyeurs of dog copulation

               and mockers of rats and monkeys,

he watched as epileptics bucked beneath the scaffold at executions,

               slavering to catch 
enough still-warm blood for a cure – the sticky stuff rilling

               over their pates and paunch.
~~~               ~~~

Though they feel pain, and are terrified by the idea, sufferers of Lesch-Nyhan

               syndrome are uncontrollably

driven to tear and bite away parts of themselves. While a man’s wife turned

               her back to wash 
the mulch from her calves, he moved from a staring at photo of a worker

               dangling precariously

from a water tower, to picking his ear, to biting the tip of his right ring-finger

               off. Like children, with their
mania for taking out dolls’ eyes to see what’s behind them. Later, doctors

               placed maggots

on the necrotic flesh of infected wounds.
~~~               ~~~

Ut beattitudo illis magis complaceat – Aquinas promised the blessed a gift:

               a vision: the agonies

of the damned; at ten Antonioni began building puppets and model sets

               for them. An adult, 
he wanted to make a documentary about the local mental hospital in the antique

               and silent town

of Ferrara. The patients—sanguisuga, the orderlies called them—helped him set up

               the equipment. Then 
he turned on the floodlights. “They went berserk,” he wrote, “and their faces—

               which had been

absent—became convulsed and devastated. It was the director of the asylum

               who finally yelled
to stop. And in the dark we felt a swarm of bodies like muddrifts taking our legs.”
~~~               ~~~

Prescribed for everything from obesity to nymphomania, Rodin

               was treated

for stroke with six plump leeches clinched to his face. A child, he broke a jar

               of them, and for nights 
lay awake imagining the parasites crawling his length, half expecting to wake

               to the floors under water,

to sheets drenched, by himself, if not by the work of “the fat red and black

               bâtard.” Now, even 
on his deathbed he has the blush of a consumptive, fresh from a cloakroom

               fuck. Afraid to be alone,

he is “visited” by sangsue – the physician brings them in a moist velvet-lined

               medical bag. So, companions 
for fifty years and soon to be wed, Rose Beuret sits beside the difficult and palsied

               artist who confides in a stupor,

that his first desire was to be a horse, a bowl of additional leeches in her lap

               in case of a second stroke. 
Near death, he pleads to have them removed; they are hanging from his nose

               and slipping

into his mouth as le cheval gallops into the migraine-darkened afterlife

               with the breath of loosened soil.