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.