How To Be A Body

I object to the way Albrecht Dürer rendered the vagina in a drawing of a woman
in the British library I wasn’t supposed to be photographing but did photograph,
if only so I could show what he did, and what I did not like about it.
I hate to say it, but he gave her a child’s vagina. It looks ceramic
and whiter than white. The woman has had the wildness drawn out of her.
Anyway, the vagina is not white, it’s more black and blue than white.
I have heard that if a child doesn’t get the right details about the body,
then something goes wrong. Evidently, Dürer did not receive these details.
His mother did not lean down to him when he was a boy and say,
This is your body, It is important and it is different from another’s.
And maybe he did not experience the fevered run up the stairs,
clothing on the steps like dropped begonias, no one led him by the hand
past a window lit by the street, no one said, Look at you in this light.
And without this, maybe the young boy made up stories to fill in the spaces.
The story was either, The body is a frightened sound from the top of a high tower
or I especially want to be loved by what I fear.