Extract Real Love
. . . (selected for the 2010 Newcastle anthology, Time with the Sky)
I’ll not romanticise death, but if you go first, grief will demand a new art
shaping darkness, a smeared optic waking daylight to muffled forms
of beauty, senseless like a senescent Struldbrugg sobbing at a funeral.
I’ll miss your circular orbicularis oris tightening as you lean your face
to lip-touch, pucker and kiss, pulling back to utter ‘u’. I’ll look for
signs of life’s high-wire skills, check the props of your disappearing act,
but the dead cover their tracks and I’m no Orpheus singing song lines
in falsetto above rocky Thrace. A jealous mob of women dismembered
and lobbed him into a river; his head sang all the way to Lesbos.
Crow flying with its shadow may notice a brightness, twist his wings
at the shoulder for increased lift, flatten his feathers, slow the beat,
spread its tail and land on your pale face; that black beak might stab
an augury from your shiny cornflower eyes; a funerary assistant could
use sticky fingers to pack your skull with resin and sawdust or linen
and a taxidermist could provide a glassy stare if your head remained round.
No such first-hand account, as Plato in the Phaedro describes how
the soul, as death’s wait is over, untangles itself from the tissue of flesh
and released floats steadily up to the eternal sphere. I love you
indescribably alive, gloving bags of breast bone and biopolymers,
amino acids stacked high. Thales was close, much of you soaks water,
with age or trauma, memory may rupture and you’d evaporate.
How do you work? How little I know of what lies beneath your skin, I touch,
stroke, tickle, caress knowing your heart is mine - the Egyptians knew anatomy,
knew the heart liked tubes suggested its vessels carried all out wetness
blood, tears, urine and sperm, I mean who has heard of Ibn al-Nafis?
anatomy excising excess, intent on the pale delineation of alabaster bone
this poem not dissecting syntax, or formalising with the enthusiasm of Vesalius
travelling from Flanders to Padua to dissect victims from the gallows,
to correct over 200 mistakes Galen, a gladiators’ doctor, made with pigs
and Barbary Apes - and the rest by priests and shamen.
I could search the archive for adventurers like Finn McCool or Colmcille
roaming the Gaeltacht from Fanad Head to Slieve League and the islands
where the sun shunts into the Atlantic and spawns anxious night.
They haunt your history of poacher turned weather-eyed gamekeeper
from Fettiglass Wood to the royal burial grounds, the tumuli of Tulsk,
where I slipped down the entrance to the underworld guarded by nettles.
Their welts ran down my arms and legs and you felt sorry for me and
kissed me better. Instead of Celtic myth I’ll make do with accounts
of raw materials, wild facts, or what I imagine destination’s facts to be.
With ritual support, magic pacifies interconnections beyond explanation,
best left to bed-time stories where they all live happily ever after.
Wary of belief, I use the scop’s ancient art, a collective memory
of kings and warriors, of death as glorious, repeated themes, a strew
of corpses subject to interrogation, repeated rhythms, enforced graves
and a future indexed to humiliation of the organism smeared with decay.
2
The end is bloody.
Pascal (via Guy Debord)
Once your heart muscle halts a life of 3 billion beats, mouth stops
and breath fades, blood pools, capillaries drain from the upper skin
that pallors to the substance of ghosts. I can imagine its last convulsion
as easily as black light. Like sharks breathing in the ocean, a body needs
a constant flow of blood or cells cease aerobic respiration and fail to generate
the energy to maintain the momentum of bones - over 200 culled from
more than 300 at birth, assembling two million red blood cells a second
to shoot though rich muscle and the web of capillaries 60,000 miles long.
The brain continuously firing across billions of synapses needing a litre
of blood each minute to inject 600 kilometres of blood vessels, or cells perish.
In the time it takes a song to sing, one professional boxing round, the city stops.
Unless frozen, burnt, or savaged by dogs and swallowed we violate ourselves.
In the time a movie takes to watch, calcium ions leak into dying muscle cells
preventing relaxation, ramming rigor mortis home, your source of strength,
a static dance that lasts as long as a Day Lily’s sombre bloom or mayfly’s flight.
To survive is never to be absolutely present; it is to remain after a past
that is no longer and to keep the memory of this past for a future that is not yet.
I argue that every moment of life is a matter of survival . . .
Martin Hägglund
. . .