From The Hinterland

After a visit to the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and especially for Kazimierz Kuczynski,
F.R.C.S. Edinburgh, and his wife, Alicia

This is a world turned inside-out,
a republic of the flesh
both strange and strangely familiar.

The walls are hung with oils,
portraits of common soldiers
who fought at Corunna or Waterloo,
where Charles Bell, army-surgeon,
paints the sun going down in musket-wounds,
with full colours, in a glory
that pale flesh puts on before nightfall.
Below, he adds medical notes, questions
treatment, fumes at his own helplessness.

The tables are ceremoniously laid
with dishes of sprigged china, glass-ware,
entire canteens of polished cutlery:
here are tools for cutting and slicing,
for gripping and probing; even a saw.
But though the cabinets are replete
with choice cuts, the guests
departed years ago.

Some packed up and left, when bodies
grew into homes they couldn’t call their own—
unnatural fruit sprouting from floorboards,
timbers shivering into Flemish lace.
As though flesh were determined
to enter the realm of metaphor,
blossoming and hardening
into mineral and vegetable forms
both beautiful and deadly—
one with Crohn’s disease leaving
when her bowel became a draper’s shop,
stuffed to the gills with pleated, peach-coloured satin;
others retreating as from a volcano
when X-rayed lungs threw up
carcinomas bright as agates;
when skin began to boil, to erupt
in melanomas black as basalt.

Still others groaned with the knowledge
of kidneys turned stone-quarries, sweating
to produce calculi of the finest limestone
and, now and then, a staghorn—
a rough, encrusted twelve-point antler;
a collector’s item, having the shape
of the renal pelvic calyceal system.
We use lasers now to shatter kidney-stones,
but fragments may still clump in the ureter,
forming a steinstrasse—a cobbled street—
down which the surgeon ventures,
retrieving bits with a mere ‘basket’.
Perhaps these ordinary names subdue
some ancient fear of having crossed
a threshold into forbidden places.

Little by little, the body gives up its secrets,
speaks back to us: is it an accident
the structure of the renal pelvis resembles
a calyx, that inner forms, as though to hint
at ancient kinship, should call up
the ghostly presences of plants?
Our nervous system branching, fanning out,
is sheathed like fennel, fine as asparagus-fern;
arteries, veins, capillaries ramifying
like algae, like rosy nets of corallina
left by the tide. Morphologies of flow,
like the child’s plait the Amazon makes,
seen from the moon, map our dependence
on the laws of life; our kinship real,
in our shared need for water, air and light.

And who can doubt that water was once our home,
seeing these skeletons of fœtal hands,
these minute brown transparent bones
poised in jars of formalin?
Delicate as the bodies of insects,
articulated like marine crustacea,
these are travellers from the hinterland
whose journey ended even before it began.
Fish-bones, writing their brief histories
in runes, in ogam-script the colour of blood;
whose perfect, counted fingers
make my own eyes swim with salt.