Autopsy

Patrick Deeley

Here in my hands is the heart he died of.

It grew too big. Imagine

the fizzing tentacles of electrical impulses

unable to fully mesh themselves

about its bulk. Imagine it leaping,

as nature intended, out of their clutches,

but doing so haphazardly,

hobbled by heaviness, a ragged accretion

of jerks and miskicks. Now, stopped

dead, it awaits my inquiry.

But in the determined white light of this

humming metal-box hospital

morgue, as I work to clarify

the cause of decease, these instruments—

so familiar and reliable—fall

idle, and instead I find the words

of poets taking hold in my thought.

Such great store as they set

by the heart—how it ‘leaps up’ at the sight

of a rainbow, or their pleading

with God to ‘batter my heart’,

or their assertion that ‘my true love hath

my heart and I have his’—

seems to contest our mortal fate.

But time, through slow trick or quick,

dims even the bright lantern of language

that lasts and lasts and yet

can’t last, and I hear myself whisper

to the cold-chambered walls that the heart

isn’t sacred, and its exposure,

autopsy: see for yourself, inflicts

no indignity. After all—I shrug, casual

or trying to be—what clinical study

of the heart can really let us say

how honestly its owner lived, or if

he loved truly, or whether he was happy?

PATRICK DEELEY is a poet, memoirist and children’s writer from Loughrea. He has published widely and his latest collection of poems is Keepsake, from Dedalus Press.