All of us came in Doctor Kerlin's bag.
He'd arrive with it, disappear to the room
And by the time he'd reappear to wash
Those nosy, rosy, big, soft hands of his
In the scullery basin, its lined insides
(The colour of a spaniel's inside lug)
Were empty for all to see, the trap-sprung mouth
Unsnibbed and gaping wide. Then like a hypnotist
Unwinding us, he'd wind the instruments
Back into their lining, tie the cloth
Like an apron round itself,
Darken the door and leave
With the bag in his hand, a plump ark by the keel ...
Until the next time came and in he'd come
In his fur-lined collar that was also spaniel-coloured
And go stooping up to the room again, a whiff
Of disinfectant, a Dutch interior gleam
Of waistcoat satin and highlights on the forceps.
Getting the water ready, that was next—
Not plumping hot, and not lukewarm, but soft,
Sud-luscious, saved for him from the rain-butt
And savoured by him afterwards, all thanks
Denied as he towelled hard and fast,
Then held his arms out suddenly behind him
To be squired and silk-lined into the camel coat.
At which point he once turned his eyes upon me,
Hyperborean, beyond-the-north-wind blue,
Two peepholes to the locked room I saw into
Every time his name was mentioned, skimmed
Milk and ice, swabbed porcelain, the white
And chill of tiles, steel hooks, chrome surgery tools
And blood dreeps in the sawdust where it thickened
At the foot of each cold wall. And overhead
The little, pendent, teat-hued infant parts
Strung neatly from a line up near the ceiling—
A toe, a foot and shin, an arm, a cock
A bit like the rosebud in his buttonhole.
II
Poeta doctus Peter Levi says
Sanctuaries of Asclepius (called asclepions)
Were the equivalent of hospitals
In ancient Greece. Or of shrines like Lourdes,
Says poeta doctus Graves. Or of the cure
By poetry that cannot be coerced,
Say I, who realized at Epidaurus
That the whole place was a sanatorium
With theatre and gymnasium and baths,
A site of incubation, where "incubation"
Was technical and ritual, meaning sleep
When epiphany occurred and you met the god ...
Hatless, groggy, shadowing myself
As the thurifer I was in an open air procession
In Lourdes in '56
When I nearly fainted from the heat and fumes,
Again I nearly fainted as I bent
To pull a bunch of grass and hallucinated
Doctor Kerlin at the steamed-up glass
Of our scullery window, starting in to draw
With his large pink index finger dot-faced men
With button-spots in a straight line down their fronts
And women with dot breasts, giving them all
A set of droopy sausage-arms and legs
That soon began to run. And then as he dipped and laved
In the generous suds again, miraculum:
The baby bits all came together swimming
Into his soapy big hygienic hands
And I myself came to, blinded with sweat,
Blinking and shaky in the windless light.
III
Bits of the grass I pulled I posted off
To one going into chemotherapy
And one who had come through. I didn't want
To leave the place or link up with the others.
It was mid-day, mid-May, pre-tourist sunlight
In the precincts of the god,
The very site of the temple of Asclepius.
I wanted nothing more than to lie down
Under hogweed, under seeded grass
And to be visited in the very eye of the day
By Hygeia, his daughter, her name still clarifying
The haven of light she was, the undarkening door.
IV
The room I came from and the rest of us all came from
Stays pure reality where I stand alone,
Standing the passage of time, and she's asleep
In sheets put on for the doctor, wedding presents
That showed up again and again, bridal
And usual and useful at births and deaths.
Me at the bedside, incubating for real,
Peering, appearing to her as she closes
And opens her eyes, then lapses back
Into a faraway smile whose precinct of vision
I would enter every time, to assist and be asked
In that hoarsened whisper of triumph,
"And what do you think
Of the new wee baby the doctor brought for us all
When I was asleep?"
Other Seamus Heaney songs:
all Seamus Heaney songs all songs from 2018