My Mother’s Body Interrogated By Light
This is what happened
Someone lifted a grey translucency to the light
and held it there
seeing the knit fracture in the clavicle
the branching ribs
the starry scatter of the bronchial tree
across the lung field a cloudy shadow
The way when we were kids she’d call us down
to see a rain-swept spider’s web
or against the kitchen window a leek sliced with light
This is what happened
Inside her body’s driftwood coracle
she held her breath her ribs coalesced
around a darkness they could read on a screen
The way she might have read the dark
of flint in chalk or a painting’s thick colour
Meaning brought into light
a green circle
held by a membrane on a glass slide
*
This is what happened
The surgeon cut the echo of my mother’s shoulder
conchoidal bony with light
Her breath was a bird caught in the thoracic cage
The porous leaves that were the wings of birds
rustled as he parted the branches
the ropes of the sail that shadowed the lung
In the cavity of her body
his hands with their instruments
tethered the branches drew knotted filaments
around the artery the venous trunks
the cartilaginous rings of the bronchial tree
The way her fingers threading a skein of colour
anchored patterns jottings silks
the names of children a network of reminders
the memorial lattice of the living
His wrists in the ribs’ net he cut death out
lifted it in its darkened flap clear of the body
The hands with their curved steel catching bone
threading filaments through muscle
resealing the fatty layers the unpeeled skin
might have been the hands of a crew mending a sail
that would float her out beyond the nodule
that new thing as strange as any flint picked up a beach
The way she’d waited once for a cocoon to hatch
a butterfly to struggle out breath
rippling the skeins the netted wing
of the scapula lifting a lacy shadow
*
This is what happened
before we knew that her hands would stiffen as twigs
that her brain would fail to solve the intricacies of a knot
before we knew that the nodule had seeded itself
invisibly along the branches of the blood
moving in that colour we see now when we lift our hands
instrumentless to the light
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:
In the Playfair Museum in search of a poem, I looked at aortic dissections and wondered how my father had ever survived one. I looked at sections of lung but my mother’s lung surgery was too recent and had failed to save her from dying of a metastatic tumour of the brain. I looked at bones and breasts and staple guns, waiting for a visual image. I came away from that first visit intrigued more by Donald Macleod’s description of laparoscopic surgery. I wrote a poem about laparoscopic depth of field but the poem was gynaecology, part of a sequence on reproductive technology.
I went back to the museum for a second visit and while hunting about on the balcony for “babies in bottles”, I came across an osteoporotic scapula. My mother had had osteoporosis and the image of that cobwebbed bone lodged in my mind, echoing the lung it had shadowed in the living body. That image became this poem; the one I hadn’t planned to write.
In the course of the writing, I was privileged to observe a lung operation at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, my thanks for which go to the Royal College of Surgeons, to Mr W. S. Walker and Miss F. M. Carnochan, and to the patient. From that intense and intimate experience came the draft of a quite different kind of poem. In search of a poem about surgery, I found a sheaf of poems.
