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ARTS AND CULTURE

The heart heals itself between beats

  • 03 October 2016
  Selected poems    

Roadside grasses, Melbourne

Can you love a city through its edgesthe tattered and weary, brave grasses seen from a tramas it shakes and rattles towards the city? I thought I was falling in love thenface pressed against the glass, passinga school playground where the children wore blue hats with wide brims, fastened under the chinlike the gap between grass and earththe blades pushing like those little necks.

 

After a gastroscopy The smile on his mouth is like the mouth guardthe tube went through. He gagged a littledespite sedation. The comments were reassuring. He asked questions. They gave him sandwichesand tea. Returned to the waiting roomhe stretches his lips at everything: reception where he received directions — was he reallythat nervous three hours ago? Everyone looksinteresting: there are flowers in a bucket and he has a good oesophagus, a good duodenumeverything inside him is at it should beeverything is gleaming, even the winter rain.

 

 

Slippers At the last your feet swelled and their shapechanged to a caricature of a foot. Howstrangely arched, it seemed, the footyou lifted from your only fit, the slipper. All you could wear: slippers befitting a mandarinin maroon velvet with embroidered uppersthe widest size for your stiff high archto slide into, without a chance of straightening. Racks and racks of shoes you possessedboots and stilettos, sandals light as airbuckles, straps, suede, satin. Surely theycould have assembled into one hybrid pair fit for your poor stiff foot that seemedlike a dinosaur trying to enter a buildingthe ceiling too low for the neck, the tail knockingover the walls, the head like your pointing big toe.

 

 

The heart heals itself between beats

When the Middlesex Hospital was coming downI walked through empty corridors to the chapeland stood behind a rood screen, admiringself-sacrificing matrons and eminent surgeons. The heart heals itself between beats.The heart heals itself between beats. Once there were amputee men in wheelchairsoutside on the pavement, smoking and flirting'How are you, sweetheart?' Blankets over their stumpsand in their eyes no lack of meaning. The heart heals itself between beats.The heart heals itself between beats. The chapel was saved. The rats ran out in legions.The nurses and doctors kept on packing.They carried long lengths of pipingand piled boxes in all the corridors. The heart heals itself between beats.The heart heals itself between beats. I read it somewhere in a journal of cardiology.Sometimes I mention it at dinner parties.The use of time, the clenching

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