Three Poems for Jane

2. Heart-Lung Transplant

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position, how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
....................... Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts
In the operation your kidneys went to sleep
and now the blood slides through transparent tubes
in and out of a stainless steel drum,
your mouth clamped open on the ventilator,
cheeks pinched in by the ribbon securing it,
eyes half-lidded with the whites staring.
Come again
from where you've gone
out of a hot present that's mostly pain,
an egoless near-vegetable existence
where only the automatic nervous system
(left to its own devices without an officer
and stumbling with its captive heart and lungs)
retreats blindly across No Man's Land...

(I sip my drink and read a magazine
as memory flickers like a fruit machine.
Synaptic circuits flash in quick succession
on Greed, Discomfort, Vanity, Aggression
and other regulars that line the bar.
Now Fear and Pity swell my repertoire
and while the standard set keeps cycling through
these hover on the square that signals You)

... the lungs still showing evidence of rejection
but the heart beating as if born into its body,
you come awake again; dazed by the shock,
bewildered by the gap from brain to voice
and the obstruction in the throat, you claw
like a trapped wolf at the tracheotomy tube...
Come again
from where you've gone
... having no place to stay – but keep your footing
across the wilderness of forking paths
doubling back to meet each other. Avoid
the easy slope to the unremembering water.
Make for the path that climbs.

-------------------------

© Brian Fewster,
Published in Envoi 123, 1999

Return to main poetry index
Return to home page