Ruffini’s Corpuscles

Spindle-shaped receptors
sensitive to skin’s stretch

Densely gathered around fingertips
where Bach’s prelude in C
flows from my daughter’s fingers
steady, reaching arpeggios
modulating to minor
less lament than statement of fact,
a walk, andante, from question through
pain
to resolution

A song for a child, a beginner yet
I hear
the minor deepen with age and loss
the thirds, sixths and sevenths descend
and darken
the first love token lost, the dream
crumpled in a cheap plastic
wastebasket
the crimson shoes dancing one girl down
to a synecdoche of stumps
while one manuscript over, the match
girl’s
fingers redden with illusory warmth

Deep within skin, they respond to
gradients of cold and heat.
When burned, the pain will only stop
if the burning
does not

Lemellar Corpuscles

Also known as Pacinian
after the Italian scientist

Whorled seeds shooting down radicles
into skin’s soil,
they detect vibration
surface texture (onyx and caterpillar,
wool and silk)
respond to rapid, intermittent pressure
(falling rain, arpeggio on your skin)
but not slow and steady stimuli
like the clothes we wear

perhaps some atavistic remnant,
our bodies’ naked longing for immersion
in what the ancient Israelites thought of
as heaven—
namely, the air we breathe

***

Lamellar refers to fine, alternating
structures
in bone, tissue, cell walls, armor,
or plates of gold

that hammered sheeting that enfolds
your vital organs
that pendant you wear just over your
heart

***

A newborn with Lamellar Ichthyosis
comes encased in a collodion sac,
waxy and translucent as rice paper
wrapping

Beneath the sac,
dark scaling,
the baby like a desiccated fish,
reluctant exile from the waterworld

Epidermis impaired,
cell envelopes poorly sealed,
he may suffer from dehydration
infection or hearing or hair loss
eyelids unable to close
hardening of palms and soles
inability to straighten his fingers
reduced ability to sweat

His adult skin:
rough, tessellated patches
overlapping scales
rather like a cantaloupe
or maybe a giraffe

***

In the pancreas, the corpuscles detect vibration from a distance
and possibly very low frequency sounds
(though why your pancreas needs
to hear
is difficult to say

perhaps it has good-humored
conversations with medieval
echoes—
black bile, phlegm and blood
whooshing through the veins,
along with air and water)

***

Pacini also studied
the retina of the human eye, the electric
organs in electric fishes, the structure
of bone, and the
mechanics of respiration

but it’s this organ
of touch and interior tremors,
visible and invisible threads of the
universe,
that bears his name

along with vibrio cholerae Pacini,
bacterium that can leach down to dry
husks
a whole earth-wrecked village of people
in two months flat

***

After caring for his two sisters,
Pacini died penniless, buried
in the cemetery of the Misericordia

From the Latin: mercy
or, his name’s ghostly echo,
the heart’s pity

Meissner’s Corpuscles

Located in skin, they sense
lightest touch
vibration
but do not detect pain, only what
brushes the skin
or presses against it, imprints of yearning
careening down branching nerves,
bundled sticks set alight
but quenched by familiarity—

If we didn’t stop feeling
clothing (rags of wool and silk)
past and present loves
pressing against heart’s hollows
(merciful senescence?)
would we go mad, reminded
since Adam’s fall we need a second skin?

***

Sensitivity in fingertips declines with age

***

My husband’s cheeks like amber
spikenard,
sweetly smelling beewort rushes
my daughter’s kiss primrose and lamb’s
ear
silvery and soft

such sensual particularity
sacrament of touch

***

Caught in streams of time and memory,
the skin/self/soul is always changing

***

The aged princess sits again in her tower,
spinning her life’s thinning thread
between her
roughened fingers.

If the spindle pricks her now, she barely feels it. No enchanted sleep, no dashing, dragon-dispensing prince armed with nothing but a flimsy sword and the chainmail certainty of his place. His palace to conquer. I mean his paramour to kiss. Their marriage plot to plant.

Fairy tales are for children, her spindle
sings, not for Queen Crones.

***

but ridge and whorl of desire

***

Fingers teasing my arm, he explains:
You can’t tickle yourself
because you can’t surprise
yourself.

Maybe, I offer, it’s because your nerves
are overloaded—
your fingers are feeling your skin
your skin is feeling your fingers
and you’re feeling your skin feeling your
fingers
and your fingers feeling your skin.
Maybe your brain can only process pure,
concentrated sensation
from another

***

The soul is the skin,
meeting place of self and self
self and other

consciousness resides in this contact

Like the joining of lovers or the Trinity’s
ecstatic oneness
so skin-on-skin,
a naked singularity where time and space
collapse,
abrogating laws of physics for bodies in
motion
or at rest

***

Remembering how their garden grew, she
dreams
each night of gorgeous, blooming shades -
azure, violet, chartreuse, rose,
velvet petals on her sleeping skin

alone in day, invisible light seems to
linger on her lined palms, their
sunbaked cracks indelible memory of
water on desert clay

***

Remember:

the body detached

(from narrative)

cannot

***

endure

Notes: Facts about the various corpuscles and some direct quotes (in italics) come
from their respective Wikipedia entries. Some ideas and quoted lines in “Meissner’s
Corpuscles” come from The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies by Michel
Serres.

Carrie Myers

Three Poems