Likestarlings

Inside the centipede

We placed a glass over the centipede, a piece of paper under it,
it breathed itself out of oxygen.
We fixed it in modified Bouin’s for 9 hours,
decapitated it, removed its antennae, tips of poison claws.
Washed it in several changes of ethanol,
infiltrated it with paraffin-bayberry wax in an oven
until there was no more smell of lilac.
We took its cephalic capsule – its head – in iridectomy tweezers,
made for picking out parts of a human eye,
and allowed it to cool and harden in chilled water.
Drained of paraffin and dried in a desiccator,
we laid the head carefully on a mount, gentle
to avoid putting anything out of shape.
The cephalic nervous system we saw through a microscope
is shaped rather like a headless, armless mermaid.
Around the upper area, where her shoulders would be,
there are three nerve bundles which innervate the intrinsic antennary musculature.
They wiggle the antennae.
The other black and purple-stained clumps and strands
are neuron masses called ganglia: the centipede’s brain.
We know that these control sensory and internuncial functions,
like walking in circles under a circular glass
or running up a nostril when a glass is brought to lips;
in one story a patient who, for two years had suffered
with the dizziness and torpor of a blocked nose,
sneezed a Geophilomorph into his handkerchief, alive.