The Body as Reliquary

In our bodies as we walk or lie, we’re stretched over bones laved with blood and water, precious and practical branches of leg or bits of finger. How fascinated I used to be by the reliquaries in Italian cathedrals, elaborately worked gold set with sapphires and embossed into intricate designs, the crystal pane protecting a splinter of wood or tatter of cloth.

In the wet collection, too, a part comes to stand for the whole. A dead crawfish in alcohol, looking as though carved from horn or bone, conjures the knobby stones over which the live creature crawled, the icy water it breathed; the low-hanging rhododendron whose shade dappled the water, the rat snake expertly climbing the tree, black-and-white belly scales gripping the bark. The sky above darkened, and a mountain storm broke. Wind stripped a branch from a hemlock and flung it into the creek. The crawfish waved its antennae and backed under the shadow of a stone as the water danced.

The fish from the Rogue River. I saw it in the wet collection. A big fish, maybe eighteen inches long, bent to fit in a tall jar with a glass lid. Collected 1898. I don’t remember the species, but I remember the curator speculating that the fish is probably extinct now, because it lived in a microclimate. Probably a single bight in the river. The river, as it was, is gone; so is the collector, bent over the blazing water. This is precious because it’s all we have.