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.
About this poem
To celebrate the Quincentenary of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, twenty-one Scottish poets were commissioned by the Scottish Poetry Library to write poems inspired by the College’s collections and work. Like surgeons they have used ‘the hand that sees’, but in this case the writing hand that acts at the prompting of insight and imagination. The poems and their comments, alongside photographs of items that inspired them, were published in The Hand that Sees: Poems for the quincentenary of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, edited by Stewart Conn, and published by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in association with the Scottish Poetry Library in 2005.
Author’s note:
I would like to thank Andrew Connell for his kind and informative introduction to the building and its exhibits. Having imagined grisly specimens and frightful instruments, I was unprepared for the sheer beauty of what I saw, even in examples of extreme pathology such as tumours, diseased organs, and kidney-stones of daunting size.
The paintings of Charles Bell were especially moving. The forerunner of war-artists like Stanley Spencer, or W. Eugene Smith, and an army-surgeon during the Napoleonic wars, Bell puts his hand to telling the truth about war’s effects on human flesh and bone. In these bleakly eloquent portraits of common soldiers, he reminds me that our bodies are all we have, and that death makes a republic of us all.
What struck me very quickly, as I searched for ways of describing what I saw, was how readily imagery began to suggest itself. Because many specimens were there precisely because they gave evidence of pathological change, it felt as though they were offering themselves as metaphors, as part of an ongoing conversation between the body and medicine. The body is not inert or speechless, and will speak back to us if we let it.
A bundle of nerves, like a handful of dried-up grasses, recalled the ramifying structures of the nervous and cardio-vascular systems. A young biology student once assured me that if it weren’t for the way plants had developed vascular bundles, humans would not be walking upright. Especially beautiful were the examples of fœtal bones, hands so small they evoked other life-forms. All of this reminded me how closely related we are to other species, and I have allowed these ideas to shape the poem, preferring to stay with the exhibits themselves, since they were so eloquent and, in many cases, so extraordinarily beautiful.
