Monday 27 May 2013

The Halving


I attended a wonderful poetry reading by Robin Robertson in Dublin. I had been a fan since reading his collection, Swithering. In the small, seventeenth century, theatre in Temple Bar, he read from two more recent collections: The Wrecking Light and Hill of Doors, which was being launched in Ireland.

He is a marvellous reader. His resonant voice filled the rectangular cockpit space with its exposed brick wall and seats on three sides. His poems are fresh, compelling, and full of tension: being austere and powerfully imagistic, spare and deeply moving.

Early in the evening he read The Halving. A poem he wrote about his heart surgery and its aftermath. I was immediately transfixed. Then I began to shake with recognition.

After the reading I disclosed that I had suffered a similarly brutal invasion of my person and we spoke about surgery, post-operative depression and recovery. He explained that he had written this poem recently, some 25 years after the operation. I was at first a little surprised, given how fresh the poem felt. Then I told him I understood the necessary delay completely. After my hospitalisation, it had taken me the best part of two years to begin to write poetry at all again - and I hadnt written a word about my surgery.


The Halving

General anaesthesia; a median sternotomy
achieved by sternal saw; the ribs
held aghast by retractor; the tubes
and cannulae drawing the blood
to the reservoir, and its bubbler;
the struggling aorta
cross clamped, the heart chilled
and stopped and left to dry.
The incompetent bicuspid valve excised,
the new one - a carbon-coated disc, housed
expensively in a cage of tantalum -
is broken from its sterile pouch
then heavily implanted into the native heart,
bolstered, seated with sutures.
The aorta freed, the heart re-started.
The blood allowed back
after its time abroad
circulating in the machine.
The rib-spreader relaxed,
the plumbing removed, the breast-bone
lashed with sternal wires, the incision closed.

Four hours I'd been away: out of my body.
Made to die then jerked back to the world.
The distractions of delerium
came and went and then,
as the morphine drained, I was left with a split
chest that ground and grated on itself.
Over the pain, a blackness rose and swelled;
'pump-head' is what some call it
- debris from the bypass machine
migrating to the brain - but it felt
more interesting than that.
Halved and unhelmed,
I had been away, I said to the ceiling,
and now I am not myself.

1 comment:

  1. From the vantage of three and one half years out these words might have introduced what was to happen.
    Telling the complexity honestly and dispelling fear.
    Giving words to speak against enquiries couched in fear.
    Helping live the un-asked mutation not grieving in fear.

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