Dissection

 

This rat looks like it is made of marzipan,

Soft and neatly packaged in its envelope;

I shake it free.

Fingering the damp, yellow fur, I know

That this first touch is far the worst.

There is a book about it that contains

Everything on a rat, with diagrams

Meticulous, but free from blood

Or all the yellow juices

I will have to pour away.

Now peg it out:

My pins are twisted and the board is hard

But, using force and fracturing its legs,

I manage though

And crucify my rat.

From the crutch to the throat the fur is ripped

Not neatly, not as shown in the diagrams,

But raggedly;

My hacking has revealed the body wall

As a sack that is fat with innards to be torn

By the inquisitive eye

And the hand that strips aside.

Inside this taut, elastic sack is a surprise;

Not the chaos I had thought to find,

No oozing mash; instead of that

A firmly coiled discipline

Of overlapping liver, folded gut;

A neatness that is like a small machine -

And I wonder what it is that has left this rat,

Why a month of probing could not make it go again,

What it is that has disappeared . . .

The bell has gone; it is time to go for lunch.

I fold the rat, replace it in its bag,

Wash from my hands the sweet

Smell of meat and formalin

And go and eat a meat pie afterwards.

So, for four weeks or so, I am told,

I shall continue to dissect this rat;

Like a child

Pulling apart a clock he cannot mend.

 

 

 

 

RELATIVE SADNESS
circa 1965

 

Einstein ‘s eyes

were filled with tears

when he heard about Hiroshima.

Mr. Tamihi

had no eyes left

to show his grief.

 

Sea Griever
circa 1965

 

I have to go down to the seas again,

to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I can hope for’s a hard life

and a watery grave when I die,

And the hacked corpse of the mutineer

at the yard arm swaying,

And the foul stench of is torn flesh

in the sun decaying.

 

I have to go down to the seas again,

for thee call of the running press

Is a wild call and if I run, I shall

find them merciless.

And all that I ask is a gory fight with

the shot a-flying,

And the flung gut and the red blood

and the wounded dying.

 

I have to go down to the seas again,

to the life that I hate and dread,

To a fool’s life and the hard life

with the maggots that crawl in the bread;

And all that I’ll get is a chance shot

from a lousy Dago gun,

And a cold sleep in the grey deep when

my poor life’s done.

 

 

1966 (Colin was 16. This poem is a parody of
Jon Masefield’s Sea Fever).