Anaesthesia Poem by Madathil Rajendran Nair

Four hours of total oblivion;
nothing moved, not a second ticked
in that blank with space-time undone

In a later revelation
I was told
masked men in green
had worked with their scalpels
on my insentient corpus
during that eventless silence

Anaesthesia is the name;
if the experience was a blank,
where did it exist
without space and time?
And who experienced it,
later to be told
that men had engaged themselves
in repair work on an unknowing mass of flesh
in a mundane matrix?

I was the world
and it was withdrawn
into the bosom of the silence I am
for four hours,
a nowhere timelessness,
later to be unfurled
like a folded umbrella;
Lo, there are the stars!

There then begins
all the old narratives;
the surgeons were there working
all the time
with their attending anaesthetist.

The grandfather clock on the wall
added measure to their toil
doing four circumambulations
around an uncaring fulcrum

The story resumes,
all reported speech;
the patient knew nothing
for he didn't know
he was an ocean of silence,
the so-called void,
where the waves of the world
were really naught,
an ephemeral reflection
of absolute non-substance