FROM THE NAKED SURGEON Poem by Michael Hartnett

V

In Hammer Glen there's blood
in milk and a goose complains
on an empty hearth: a cat
swells in the churn, dead and full.
A flitch of bacon hangs itself
from rafters: a tongs stands like a bull.
My first trip to the house of thatch -

home of the Slaughter Lad
who condemned his own kind -
a hammer-vision showed him how
to escape the bird-lime.
I was called, no scalpel packed.
I threw a saddle on the dark
and galloped to the threshold of his mind.

Knots of briars slid from their nests,
each poisoned eye a blackberry.
I was pelted with a shower of fruit
from a bare blackthorn tree.
I heard the chick sing in the egg,
and the straw in the mattress grew,
the raspberry cried in the jam.

But I came safe from the shade
out of the battle-noise gales
until I reached Slaughter Lad's
and saw there under the moon's eye
a hedgehog milking a jack snipe,
a goat beating a drum in the sky -
I had crossed over the borders of the live.

I walked into his head -
no knife, no healing herb -
helix of a snail's shell,
into a complex corridor.
Prayers of hate, echoes of roars
fell from the faceted walls -
his father's face was carved on the floor.

"I hit him hit him hit him again -
the goose drank the juice of this brain,
I made a pigtrough from his skull
and put his eyes under a hen.
One did not hatch at all
the other shook and cracked.
Out walked a chicken's claw."

"The claw still sticks in me -
it tortures and exhausts:
contrition runs from my nose,
surgeon, give me peace."
I refused. And left the place.
I threw away all style and craft,
my heart was ash and chaff,
my soul was a gravel bed -
a naked surgeon and my patient dead.