The Surgeon

 

Exposing a Heart, Does The Surgeon Think of Love? 

 

[The Surgeon, painted in 1952 by British realist Irene Blake, has hung in the same alcove at the British Museum for three decades.]

 

 

When you left, I wanted quiet,

Craved it the way some women

Want French chocolates or a second home

In Knightsbridge. So I ran each day

To silence, as far as the Circle Line

Could take me, to Bloomsbury

And the British Museum.

I took my Das Kapital, my sorrow

And your German dictionary and climbed

To a back alcove and a single leather chair.

I read and waited, leaning forward to listen

To no sounds at all.

 

When the mornings were cold again,

I began to notice things,

Like an invalid who one day

Surprises herself by showing some interest.

I looked finally at the picture

Above my head. It made me smile at first:

Five hunched figures in an operating room,

Bunched around a slab of table

Like wallflowers at a crystal punch bowl.

 

 

But not The Surgeon. Knife in hand,

He’s the scene’s bright center, a candle

Burning to completion. Candle hands

Betraying passion, tapering fingers

Extended in precise and knowing faith.

Day after day, I watch those hands

Cut into a human heart.

I see the scalpel lift bits of history:

Small betrayals, tiny rifts,

Blood red sorrow scraped clean away.

My Surgeon whistles Lohengrin

And Heals hearts whole of you.

 

 

- Unknown

 

While in college at Berkeley, I befriended Trey, a young lover of verse. He studied English at a university in Tennessee and is now a minister in the United Methodist Church. One winter night, we got drunk on red wine and read e.e. cummings to each other. My volume of the Complete Poems still bears rose-colored stains on some of its pages.

 

Trey sent this poem to me in California with an inscription on the back, written in faint green marker and cummings-like font: “this poem is so ana…i read it and thought immediately of YOU!”

 

Through all of my schools, travels, and phases, I have never let go of this poem. I don’t talk to Trey anymore, but I treasure his gift. It is a photocopy, typewritten and duplicated with lines and creases from a Xerox or mimeograph machine. A single whole punctures the top center, revealing its former place on my bulletin board.

 

The author’s name is conspicuously absent. I’ve always assumed that the poem was written by a former student who’d studied abroad in London. In my mind’s eye, I saw this poem passed around by generations of impressed English professors. 

 

 

When Trey said this poem was “me,” he was referring to Marx and the German dictionary. He was also probably alluding to my love of art. 

 

 

But I love this poem, ten years later, because of its language and form. I love its lack of stylized meter and rhyme, revealing a humbly defiant ability to flow with innate diction and pace. Most of all, I love the careful details describing a decadent, heartbroken ritual of retreat. 

 

 

I, too, have used public transit to go and sit with a favorite painting like an old friend. I’ve never known the luxury, though, of treating one as the backdrop for some reading. I know a fellow who flees to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to do just this. With his student identification card from Columbia University, he gets in for free, finds a seat to curl up in and reads, wandering tourists notwithstanding. The only public places where I’ve felt comfortable enough to curl are Californian cafés and empty church sanctuaries.

 

When the building housing Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum was threatened with removal, one voice objected, claiming the museum as “his church.” It occurs to me now, after an umpteenth reading, that the British Museum, too, is this poet’s church. 

Copyright © 2007 Anastasia Hacopian. All rights reserved.